One of the famous old economists (Smith, or Keynes, someone like that) also predicted that increased productivity would inevitably lead to the end of work, with everyone free to pursue leisure activities, enjoying unparalleled prosperity. But it doesn't seem to work out that way; those for whom there is no more work live in grinding poverty, while the majority of those who do work, work longer hours than ever. (The work is, however, by and large physically less taxing and more enjoyable.)
Ironically, there's an article in the Economist this week about how the Greeks gave up on income tax decades ago and tried to redress the shortfall via VAT.
It's true that there are lots of Commonwealth tax bolt holes. This is the main reason why income and corporation tax are ineffective, the revenue shortfall falls onto those that can't afford to avoid the tax but can afford to pay it (the middle classes end up subsidising the wealthy), and people start to look to other forms of taxation, like the OP. To my mind, the answer is to fix the loopholes, not try to fudge around them.
A graph I found earlier today, re: whether marginal tax rates correlates with GDP (which you would expect if "wealth creators" upped sticks to avoid tax, or returned in droves when rates were lowered - there was something in the news last week about a study on this, but I can't find it):
As to the Netherlands vs Greece, well, there are plenty of examples either way. I've always found it relatively easy to see examples of centre-left societies working reasonably well (Austria, Denmark, Norway etc) than centre-right societies (are there any? Australia maybe?)
If fairness is off the table as a consideration for taxation, then my counter-proposal is to abolish all taxes except for a tax on wealth, starting at the top and working our way down until it raises enough revenues. But of course fairness is always at the heart of tax arguments; most people who argue against income taxes have a profound sense that it is unfair that the money they've earned with their own blood, sweat and tears is taken from them, to pay for services they perceive as being of no benefit to them.
Innovating around VAT is harder than you might think in a free market. For EU members there is a minimum basic VAT rate of 15% so you can't go lower than that. If you go too much higher than another member state's rate, people will avoid the tax by importing from overseas. (I'm not saying you couldn't innovate, just that it wouldn't be as easy as you suggest. The EU is a red herring here, it applies to any free market.) VAT is also not as unavoidable as one might think, as seen with the recent Amazon case. (Charging UK customers 20% VAT, but paying a much lower VAT rate in a different tax district, pocketing the difference.)
As to rich people spending or giving away all their wealth, it just doesn't happen. Your examples (Gates and Buffett) are notable precisely because they're exceptions (and even then I'd be interested to know what tax rate their donations would amount to if treated as tax). Wealth is scarce, so mostly it's rented out to those that don't have it (i.e. loans that generate interest), giving it a certain gravity that causes it to pool. Show me a rich person who dies penniless, having spent every last dime living it up till the end -- it doesn't happen. That is why I, for example, pay 1% of my take home pay every year to the duke of something or other, whose forefathers were gifted the land I happen to live on. They didn't give it away, and I see no reason to expect the current duke to give it away either.
In the UK at least, we've experienced the philanthropic utopia, where the many of the wealthy (many more than today, at least) felt duty bound (by religion) to give away their wealth, general taxation was minimal, and welfare was provided by charities and society at large (private individuals making the decisions as to where to contribute their wealth). It was called the Victorian era, and it was hellish for just about everyone, and the social safety nets we have today were largely born of an understanding that things could not go on as they were if we were to avoid the convulsive revolutions seen elsewhere in Europe.
Bloody socialists. My garbage is mine to dispose of as I see fit -- after, all I created it through my own private endeavour! To see it wrested from my hands is frankly an assault on my liberty and a chilling curb on garbage creators like me everywhere. By golly, if they take too much of my garbage, I'll be forced to move overseas.
Not sure this is the example I'd choose for the failure of capitalism... the rail fiasco, or energy prices, are much clearer examples. 4G isn't exactly a critical infrastructure service, and if it ever becomes one, by then all the other providers will have come on-stream (they're rolling out 6 months from now).
The downer for me in this announcement was that I'd hoped to have enough data on 4G to ditch wired home broadband (limited to 3Mbps until FTTC comes along) and just tether my phone, but if these caps are indicative of what all the providers will be allowing, then that's a dead end.
This doesn't seem unreasonable does it? When the kids are at school, the staff are in loco parentis, and so keeping tabs on the little bastards doesn't sound crazy. After all if one of them goes AWOL and turns up in a suitcase, the school's likely to be sued.
Of course if it's being used for data collection for behavioural profiling or resale, that's another matter, but if it's just for "this kid was here earlier but didn't answer roll call, where the hell is he?" or "it's recess and we need to get a message to this kid, where the hell is he?" that seems fine.
-- What does that have to do with open source software and open source hardware?
(I'm not sure I've understood this question, as I'd assume the issues with closed software and hardware are familiar to anyone who reads slashdot.) Many of the companies that produce hardware and software do so in a way that is deliberately designed to work against you. Off the top of my head... CarrierIQ springs to mind. Apple's walled garden. Vendor lock-in. Standards bait-and-switch. Patent submarines and trolls. Tivoisation. Non-repairable hardware. Security through obscurity. Thanks to the market, you often have choice, but instead of just not doing these shitty things and instead adding value, the evil fuckers are expending their effort and money on keeping you in the dark and misdirecting you until it's too late, and you're locked into your two year contract or whatever.
It seems evident to me that software and hardware that has been vetted by someone like the FSF to ensure it does not represent the kinds of practices listed above is better, all other things being equal. This vetting is only possible if it is open source.
-- You can't seriously believe open-source companies are limited from things like "bribes and advertising" by the FSF's bullet points
(BTW by advertising I mean the kind of advertising that deliberately exploits our frailties.)
No I don't believe that they are limited from these things. The evil fuckers are everywhere, and such is their nature that you often don't realise it till they present you with the bill. An open source company could still be trying their damnedest to fuck you over.
But I do believe that producing the kind of product that would pass the FSF bullet list is a good indicator that the company's values and priorities are aligned with mine, and they're therefore less likely to be evil fuckers, or at least are being forced to innovate and find new ways of being total douchebags.
-- At this point, you're just going hyperbolic to try to make everyone agree with you
I think "evil fuckers" is a good shorthand for most businesses of a certain size. Yes, it's hyperbolic. But basically the gist of their attitude is to do absolutely anything at all to reduce costs and maximise profits, which is effectively a search for a way of giving you nothing and taking everything (aka "maximising ARPU"). It's hard for me not to see this as a pretty reasonable definition of evil, even if it's carried out in an environment of competition that in theory prevents it from coming to pass. And if someone is the sort that's convinced himself that this quest is not only not evil, but actually good -- "good business" -- then, well, he's a fucker.
-- [The FSF and communists] fight against capitalists (which makes them good in your mind)
I'm a capitalist, in the sense that I take capitalism as a given. I believe our choice isn't between free markets and central planning, it's between free markets and black markets. But I don't believe that capitalism has to have the bias towards immorality that it currently seems to ("If I don't pull this dick move that screws people over but is to my advantage, my competitor will, and I'll soon be out of business"). It seems feasible to me to have a form of regulated capitalism where the spirit of the regulation is that businesses should provide customer value, and if it is shown that they have deliberately acted against this spirit, they are sent to the naughty chair. We see this can work with things like, random example, car safety standards.
The world is awash with evil fuckers who, rather than trying to win you over with solid products and services, will expend their effort and money on bribes, advertising, patent warchests, takeovers and suchlike with the sole goal of manipulating, extorting, deceiving and straitjacketing you, not just to get the money you have now, but an ever increasing tithe, in perpetuity. Against this backdrop, a small organisation starts a modest initiative to help lift the veil from these practices to help you, and you... mock them for it.
I've no experience of a company large enough to have a whole separate set of people to do installations, so my comment is from the small company experience.
Problems will get fixed faster if the developer has access to the installation and is familiar with the environment. Live environments are never the same as test environments, so for software above a certain level of complexity there are likely to be site-specific issues.
But it takes a good developer to tread carefully around a live system and to then retro any fixes back into the code base and test it. A methodical release/report/debug/fix/rerelease cycle -- whether or not it's the developer doing the installing -- might be slow and tedious but will have a lower chance of regression errors. It depends very much on whether the customer can afford/tolerate the time and disruption to live systems involved.
I've enjoyed using Ubuntu. It was the first Linux distro that "just worked" for me (by which I mean, wifi/video/audio worked out of the box). And it's free!
I don't know what kind of ARPU they expect from this, but as an Ubuntu user I'd prefer to just pay. A freemium model would do, maybe something like "get the previous LTS version for free, get the current one for $X". Or "donate to enable advanced features" or something. But peppering my work/leisure environment with third-party advertisements (i.e. spyware and probably malware at some point)? No thanks.
I suppose there will be a degree of negativity about boot to gecko, along the lines of "they've already lost" and "they should focus on fixing the browser".
Personally, I wish them every success. Firefox has been great, and the idea of a phone OS built by a non-profit whose only agenda revolves around standards, privacy, user control, openness and general sanity will be a refreshing change from the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. It actually seems to be happening, too, unlike so many other projects we hear about.
(But if you want some negativity - given that they're primarily funded by Google, and presumably don't have a massive patent war chest, they'll probably be sunk if they ever get anywhere. Time to donate!)
Presumably prior art results for patents held by Google will be excluded?
I doubt they'd really do this, at least not until something embarassing happened, but the point is, how would you know, since it's their engine? (Obviously, only an incompetent would interpret the absence of prior art in Google's database as an absence of prior art.)
My experience of Linux (various distros, at home and at work) is that right now it is somewhat in flux as regards desktop environments. So if you're not a huge tinkerer and do make the switch, go with something that is in long term support (LTS), so that you can get used to whatever desktop comes with it without having to re-adapt every time your distro gets updated.
I once unthinkingly put on a t-shirt that had a machine gun on it on the day I was travelling. At security I was asked to turn it inside out (by the guys with actual machine guns), which I did, and that was that. Thankfully I wasn't wearing one of my other t-shirts...
Slashdot Mirror
Here's an article from the Guardian (UK) about the "end of work" and work trends:
http://www.skidelskyr.com/site/article/why-we-need-weekends/
One of the famous old economists (Smith, or Keynes, someone like that) also predicted that increased productivity would inevitably lead to the end of work, with everyone free to pursue leisure activities, enjoying unparalleled prosperity. But it doesn't seem to work out that way; those for whom there is no more work live in grinding poverty, while the majority of those who do work, work longer hours than ever. (The work is, however, by and large physically less taxing and more enjoyable.)
On this evidence, it also seems to be happening much faster in China. It took about 50 years for well-paying, low-skilled jobs to be all but extinct in the US, leading to the current levels of poverty and social inequality there. Interesting article on this in this week's Economist: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21565956-americas-poor-were-little-mentioned-barack-obamas-re-election-campaign-they-deserve
Ironically, there's an article in the Economist this week about how the Greeks gave up on income tax decades ago and tried to redress the shortfall via VAT.
It's true that there are lots of Commonwealth tax bolt holes. This is the main reason why income and corporation tax are ineffective, the revenue shortfall falls onto those that can't afford to avoid the tax but can afford to pay it (the middle classes end up subsidising the wealthy), and people start to look to other forms of taxation, like the OP. To my mind, the answer is to fix the loopholes, not try to fudge around them.
A graph I found earlier today, re: whether marginal tax rates correlates with GDP (which you would expect if "wealth creators" upped sticks to avoid tax, or returned in droves when rates were lowered - there was something in the news last week about a study on this, but I can't find it):
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_best_policy/2010/02/tax_fraud.html
As to the Netherlands vs Greece, well, there are plenty of examples either way. I've always found it relatively easy to see examples of centre-left societies working reasonably well (Austria, Denmark, Norway etc) than centre-right societies (are there any? Australia maybe?)
If fairness is off the table as a consideration for taxation, then my counter-proposal is to abolish all taxes except for a tax on wealth, starting at the top and working our way down until it raises enough revenues. But of course fairness is always at the heart of tax arguments; most people who argue against income taxes have a profound sense that it is unfair that the money they've earned with their own blood, sweat and tears is taken from them, to pay for services they perceive as being of no benefit to them.
Innovating around VAT is harder than you might think in a free market. For EU members there is a minimum basic VAT rate of 15% so you can't go lower than that. If you go too much higher than another member state's rate, people will avoid the tax by importing from overseas. (I'm not saying you couldn't innovate, just that it wouldn't be as easy as you suggest. The EU is a red herring here, it applies to any free market.) VAT is also not as unavoidable as one might think, as seen with the recent Amazon case. (Charging UK customers 20% VAT, but paying a much lower VAT rate in a different tax district, pocketing the difference.)
As to rich people spending or giving away all their wealth, it just doesn't happen. Your examples (Gates and Buffett) are notable precisely because they're exceptions (and even then I'd be interested to know what tax rate their donations would amount to if treated as tax). Wealth is scarce, so mostly it's rented out to those that don't have it (i.e. loans that generate interest), giving it a certain gravity that causes it to pool. Show me a rich person who dies penniless, having spent every last dime living it up till the end -- it doesn't happen. That is why I, for example, pay 1% of my take home pay every year to the duke of something or other, whose forefathers were gifted the land I happen to live on. They didn't give it away, and I see no reason to expect the current duke to give it away either.
In the UK at least, we've experienced the philanthropic utopia, where the many of the wealthy (many more than today, at least) felt duty bound (by religion) to give away their wealth, general taxation was minimal, and welfare was provided by charities and society at large (private individuals making the decisions as to where to contribute their wealth). It was called the Victorian era, and it was hellish for just about everyone, and the social safety nets we have today were largely born of an understanding that things could not go on as they were if we were to avoid the convulsive revolutions seen elsewhere in Europe.
Because VAT is a regressive tax, i.e. the poor pay more in VAT as a proportion of their income than the better off.
Bloody socialists. My garbage is mine to dispose of as I see fit -- after, all I created it through my own private endeavour! To see it wrested from my hands is frankly an assault on my liberty and a chilling curb on garbage creators like me everywhere. By golly, if they take too much of my garbage, I'll be forced to move overseas.
Not sure this is the example I'd choose for the failure of capitalism... the rail fiasco, or energy prices, are much clearer examples. 4G isn't exactly a critical infrastructure service, and if it ever becomes one, by then all the other providers will have come on-stream (they're rolling out 6 months from now).
The downer for me in this announcement was that I'd hoped to have enough data on 4G to ditch wired home broadband (limited to 3Mbps until FTTC comes along) and just tether my phone, but if these caps are indicative of what all the providers will be allowing, then that's a dead end.
This doesn't seem unreasonable does it? When the kids are at school, the staff are in loco parentis, and so keeping tabs on the little bastards doesn't sound crazy. After all if one of them goes AWOL and turns up in a suitcase, the school's likely to be sued.
Of course if it's being used for data collection for behavioural profiling or resale, that's another matter, but if it's just for "this kid was here earlier but didn't answer roll call, where the hell is he?" or "it's recess and we need to get a message to this kid, where the hell is he?" that seems fine.
In terms of "Google's contribution to the nation's economy" I hope the US is getting a better deal from Google than the UK is:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/20/google-uk-tax-avoidance
I'm reminded of this classic from a bygone age of the internet:
http://web.archive.org/web/19961222143340/http://www.europa.com/~dogman/install.html
-- What does that have to do with open source software and open source hardware?
(I'm not sure I've understood this question, as I'd assume the issues with closed software and hardware are familiar to anyone who reads slashdot.) Many of the companies that produce hardware and software do so in a way that is deliberately designed to work against you. Off the top of my head... CarrierIQ springs to mind. Apple's walled garden. Vendor lock-in. Standards bait-and-switch. Patent submarines and trolls. Tivoisation. Non-repairable hardware. Security through obscurity. Thanks to the market, you often have choice, but instead of just not doing these shitty things and instead adding value, the evil fuckers are expending their effort and money on keeping you in the dark and misdirecting you until it's too late, and you're locked into your two year contract or whatever.
It seems evident to me that software and hardware that has been vetted by someone like the FSF to ensure it does not represent the kinds of practices listed above is better, all other things being equal. This vetting is only possible if it is open source.
-- You can't seriously believe open-source companies are limited from things like "bribes and advertising" by the FSF's bullet points
(BTW by advertising I mean the kind of advertising that deliberately exploits our frailties.)
No I don't believe that they are limited from these things. The evil fuckers are everywhere, and such is their nature that you often don't realise it till they present you with the bill. An open source company could still be trying their damnedest to fuck you over.
But I do believe that producing the kind of product that would pass the FSF bullet list is a good indicator that the company's values and priorities are aligned with mine, and they're therefore less likely to be evil fuckers, or at least are being forced to innovate and find new ways of being total douchebags.
-- At this point, you're just going hyperbolic to try to make everyone agree with you
I think "evil fuckers" is a good shorthand for most businesses of a certain size. Yes, it's hyperbolic. But basically the gist of their attitude is to do absolutely anything at all to reduce costs and maximise profits, which is effectively a search for a way of giving you nothing and taking everything (aka "maximising ARPU"). It's hard for me not to see this as a pretty reasonable definition of evil, even if it's carried out in an environment of competition that in theory prevents it from coming to pass. And if someone is the sort that's convinced himself that this quest is not only not evil, but actually good -- "good business" -- then, well, he's a fucker.
-- [The FSF and communists] fight against capitalists (which makes them good in your mind)
I'm a capitalist, in the sense that I take capitalism as a given. I believe our choice isn't between free markets and central planning, it's between free markets and black markets. But I don't believe that capitalism has to have the bias towards immorality that it currently seems to ("If I don't pull this dick move that screws people over but is to my advantage, my competitor will, and I'll soon be out of business"). It seems feasible to me to have a form of regulated capitalism where the spirit of the regulation is that businesses should provide customer value, and if it is shown that they have deliberately acted against this spirit, they are sent to the naughty chair. We see this can work with things like, random example, car safety standards.
The world is awash with evil fuckers who, rather than trying to win you over with solid products and services, will expend their effort and money on bribes, advertising, patent warchests, takeovers and suchlike with the sole goal of manipulating, extorting, deceiving and straitjacketing you, not just to get the money you have now, but an ever increasing tithe, in perpetuity. Against this backdrop, a small organisation starts a modest initiative to help lift the veil from these practices to help you, and you... mock them for it.
They're probably sitting on enough cash to move towns and rivers to match their maps.
Looking forward to IE6OS... *shudder*
I've no experience of a company large enough to have a whole separate set of people to do installations, so my comment is from the small company experience.
Problems will get fixed faster if the developer has access to the installation and is familiar with the environment. Live environments are never the same as test environments, so for software above a certain level of complexity there are likely to be site-specific issues.
But it takes a good developer to tread carefully around a live system and to then retro any fixes back into the code base and test it. A methodical release/report/debug/fix/rerelease cycle -- whether or not it's the developer doing the installing -- might be slow and tedious but will have a lower chance of regression errors. It depends very much on whether the customer can afford/tolerate the time and disruption to live systems involved.
I've enjoyed using Ubuntu. It was the first Linux distro that "just worked" for me (by which I mean, wifi/video/audio worked out of the box). And it's free!
I don't know what kind of ARPU they expect from this, but as an Ubuntu user I'd prefer to just pay. A freemium model would do, maybe something like "get the previous LTS version for free, get the current one for $X". Or "donate to enable advanced features" or something. But peppering my work/leisure environment with third-party advertisements (i.e. spyware and probably malware at some point)? No thanks.
I suppose there will be a degree of negativity about boot to gecko, along the lines of "they've already lost" and "they should focus on fixing the browser".
Personally, I wish them every success. Firefox has been great, and the idea of a phone OS built by a non-profit whose only agenda revolves around standards, privacy, user control, openness and general sanity will be a refreshing change from the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. It actually seems to be happening, too, unlike so many other projects we hear about.
(But if you want some negativity - given that they're primarily funded by Google, and presumably don't have a massive patent war chest, they'll probably be sunk if they ever get anywhere. Time to donate!)
For your use of the word cromulent, may I offer you my most enthusiastic contrafibularities!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOSYiT2iG08
Presumably prior art results for patents held by Google will be excluded?
I doubt they'd really do this, at least not until something embarassing happened, but the point is, how would you know, since it's their engine? (Obviously, only an incompetent would interpret the absence of prior art in Google's database as an absence of prior art.)
Because, to a large extent, Goldman Sachs is the government?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs#Alumni
...that ice doesn't melt in the case of legitimate warming.
My experience of Linux (various distros, at home and at work) is that right now it is somewhat in flux as regards desktop environments. So if you're not a huge tinkerer and do make the switch, go with something that is in long term support (LTS), so that you can get used to whatever desktop comes with it without having to re-adapt every time your distro gets updated.
Mass extinctions are also unusual (but not unprecedented). Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to avoid causing them!
I once unthinkingly put on a t-shirt that had a machine gun on it on the day I was travelling. At security I was asked to turn it inside out (by the guys with actual machine guns), which I did, and that was that. Thankfully I wasn't wearing one of my other t-shirts...