I proposed a specific scheme for avoiding income tax that does not work.
You're right: your specific proposal doesn't work, but your specific proposal is bullshit, starting with the fact that corporate profits aren't like income tax. It didn't seem worth pointing that out.
What I was saying is that wealthy individuals have many ways of tax avoidance in Europe for capital gains and other "profits", namely by changing their formal place of residence, by creating trusts, and by moving their investments around.
If you earn a regular income from an employer, it is very hard for you to avoid income tax in both Europe and the US. That's how European welfare states are financed: by bleeding their middle class dry because they can't do anything about it.
I'm arguing that most rich Europeans do pay their income tax (in fact, the vast majority that does not live in Switzerland).
You're missing the point. You originally said that "The tax man will skin you alive if you try this." But, in fact, individuals have plenty of ways of avoiding paying income and capital gains taxes quite legally. So your notion that corporations are somehow privileged in being able to do this is false.
The situation I was describing is someone setting up a trust overseas to avoid paying income tax. It does not work
No, but what does work (and what I was referring to) is setting up trusts and non-profits at home.
I think the 1st Amendment is very clear (and simple) and yet people have been executed (the Rosenburgs (sp?) for telling how to make an atomic bomb) for speech due to some Judge deciding that the 1st doesn't cover some types of speech.
The fact that courts interpret laws differently from their plain meaning is not proof that the laws are unclear. (Nevertheless, your understanding of the First Amendment is faulty.)
And if you don't want to pay taxes, don't. It's really easy, just don't take the benefits of those taxes just like any other economic transaction you don't want to do.
Taxes are due whether you "take the benefits of those taxes" or not.
Stuart Newman calls the use of chimeras as entering unsettling ground which damages "our sense of humanity."
You know what damages people's sense of humanity even more? Dying miserably even though modern medical technology could make you well, because some prick called Stuart Newman takes the position that a pig is more important than a human or thinks that a human kidney somehow gives a pig a soul.
The problem is that the law as written has fuzzy edges and whether they're obeying the law or not can only be decided in a court of law
I think the law is quite clear and Google is complying with it: these are well-defined companies engaging in well-defined, legal transactions that happen to greatly reduce tax liability.
If France pushes ahead on this, Google will find other ways of reducing its tax liability, and those are likely going to be economically worse for France than not having collected these taxes in the first place.
The real problem is that taxation is an intrinsically flawed concept: forcing people at gunpoint to give money to the state for goods and services they often don't want in the first place simply is not going to work well, ever. People are going to find ways of avoiding taxes if not for any other reason because they don't want to feel like fools. The only reliable way to pay for goods and services is to engage in voluntary exchanges in a free market.
as they still need to actually move to Switzerland to pay tax there
Capital gains are tax-free in Switzerland, and the top federal income tax bracket is 11.5%. Cantonal income tax varies between about 2% and 10%.
The tax man does not accept you simply setting up a trust there
You misunderstood. Wealthy Europeans can avoid paying taxes in their own home countries without even the trouble of moving by putting their wealth into trusts.
And it kinda sucks living in Switzerland if all your family and friends are in Spain.
They live in Switzerland, have a trust-owned estate in Spain, and go back and forth by private jet or chauffeur. Sounds pretty sweet to me. And it's all legal. Besides, wealthy Spaniards have closer tax havens than Switzerland.
Yes they do, or is a sledge and a sewn warming west and a spear not technology?
In that sense, your distinction is meaningless because people require technology to survive everywhere. That is, climate change then changes nothing.
There are no maps included on your climate history
I can only point you in the right direction; you need to learn this stuff yourself and do your own reading.
The article is not about climate change per se, but about a catastrophic one where average increase is over +10C.
The article is about a 9.5C average global temperature increase due to burning all fossil fuel. I'm pointing out that that "average" increase is mostly due to cold areas getting warmer, and that that is a good thing.
Under a runaway greenhouse effect that wont even take 100 years.
It is physically impossible to melt the polar ice caps in 100 years with a 9.5C average temperature increase.
And to those that say these companies are not doing anything illegal: try claiming to the tax man that you have to pay no income tax because you have no income, because all you earn you have to pay to a company based in Panama called John Doe, inc., as this company owns your name and lets you use it for the exact amount of taxable income that you earn each month.
Wealthy individuals in Europe do this all the time: they move to Monaco or Switzerland or the Bahamas and transfer their assets to trusts and not-for-profit companies. It's only the European lower and middle classes that can't escape Europe's massive taxation legally; of course, regular Europeans just lie and cheat on their taxes at much higher rates than Americans.
Big corporations have been playing a shell game with the tax man for a long time.
No, they are simply complying with the law as written.
The deficit caused by these big corporations using government services but yet skating out on the tax bill, has been handed to the rest of us to settle.
If France tries to change the rules, it first needs to articulate a consistent set of alternative rules. France's new rules seem to boil down to treating the entire sales price of, say, a German-made Mercedes in France as profit and then taxing it at the corporate tax rate. That doesn't seem sensible, and it also seems like companies other than Google might have a problem with it.
Of course, the EU is also shooting itself in the foot if it thinks that changing rules retroactively is a good idea. Legally, they may get away with it, but it will simply sour investors and entrepreneurs even more on investing in Europe; European stocks are performing poorly enough as is.
For niche places on earth perhaps. In general: no.
There is no need to guess or engage in your weird kind of pseudoscience, we can actually just look at climate history to see what the planet is like when it is much warmer.
No we are not. No single human is adapted to live in the arctics or the deserts or the jungle. we use technology to do that. Can't be so hard to grasp the difference.
Inuit and Berber don't use "technology", they just use their brains, their skills, and simple tools.
Around 45C - 50C humans can not survive outside.
And that is relevant to climate change... how? Climate increases global average temperatures mostly by increasing temperatures in cold regions. It also causes increased precipitation. Both of those are positive changes.
On top of that in the long run we have a sea level rise of 20 - 30 meters (to lazy to google, can be even 50).
In fact the absolute maximum is about 80m. It will take about 1-2 millennia for that kind of sea level rise, which means that it is so slow that it simply isn't a problem.
And that's why people should stop babbling about "saving earth". Not only does "earth not care", life on this planet would thrive with a return to warmer temperatures.
Therefore, the only entities that care care about keeping fairly close to the climate civilization developed in.
Humans evolved during a period of massive and repeated climate change, and civilization developed in the context of massive global warming and climate change. So, going by history, warming and climate change would be good things.
Of course, you can measure a real profit in saving our earth.
"Saving our earth" from what? Returning to the kind of climate it had throughout most of mammalian and primate evolution?
From Earth's point of view, it's the exceptionally cold climate and massive ice caps that we have had for the last few million years that is the "climate catastrophe".
Even if GW is not AGW, even if GW is not real, why should we not as a species work to reduce our impacts everywhere?
Because what makes "us as a species" distinct and evolutionarily successful is three things: free will, social evolution, and our ability to shape the environment.
Furthermore, in this case, it's the current climate (polar ice caps, glaciation cycles) that is unusual; if we return to a planetary state without polar ice caps or glaciation cycles, we'd be simply returning the planet to what it was like during most of mammalian and primate evolution.
verage temperatures would climb by up to 9.5 degrees Celsius (17 degrees Fahrenheit) -- five times the cap on global warming set at climate talks in Paris in December. In the Arctic region -- already heating at more than double the global average -- the thermometer would rise an unimaginable 15 C to 20 C." This would make most of Earth uninhabitable to humans (although the dinosaurs seemed to do fine with it 65 million years ago).
A rise of 9.5C would certainly cause lots of changes across the world, but it wouldn't "scorch" earth. The term "scorch" implies arid, infertile land. In fact, it would make earth's climate more uniform, more mild, and generally wetter. If the transition period is slow enough (several centuries), this would arguably be a better climate than what we have now. The major cost would be loss of coastal lands due to sea level rise, but that would be even slower than temperature rise. That would probably be more than compensated for by the opening up of large areas with mild climates in the Arctic and the Antarctic.
This would make most of Earth uninhabitable to humans (although the dinosaurs seemed to do fine with it 65 million years ago).
That's just wrong, for a couple of reasons. First, such climatic conditions existed over long time periods, and not only dinosaurs did fine (until asteroids and volcanoes kille them), but also mammals and primates. Second, among large land animals, humans are the most adaptive to different climates: we can live from the Arctic all the way down to the Sahara.
What the study really tells you is that even if we could burn all fossil fuel (which we can't really), the worst thing that would happen is that we get a warm, wet climate all over the globe and gradual sea level rise that causes cities to slowly move away from the current coastlines over the span of the next thousand years. No doubt this is bad for Miami or NYC real estate corporations with an eye on the long term; for the rest of humanity, it's probably somewhere between neutral to positive.
The only things I've said that give many pointers to my beliefs are expressions of amazement that you would support the abolition of regulations on pharmaceuticals.
And I find it just as amazing that you would support regulations that have not been shown to be necessary or effective, yet make drugs astronomically expensive and tremendously slow progress in medicine.
Glad to get it cleared up that you think child labour laws are an "illiberal fix". I'd love to hear your thesis for why child labour wouldn't occur in a truly free society.
I'm sure some child labor would occur in truly free societies; it's not intrinsically bad.
I'd also love to hear you explain whether a free adult should have any responsibilities towards a child they conceive, in the context of your liberalism.
Parents have lots of moral responsibilities towards their children. But making a moral responsibility a legal obligation is neither necessary nor (usually) effective.
If so, should anyone else have the burden of looking after that child?
Most people do not consider looking after a child a "burden". The fact that you do is pretty revealing.
Well, based on your postings, you are clearly one of those "wishy-washy newbies" who has no problem in principle with any law, as long as it can be said to "benefit society". European history provides ample examples of where that leads.
As for child labor laws, they are a good thing in the context of an already unfree and dysfunctional society. But an illiberal fix for massive problems caused by lack of liberty in the first place is hardly an instance of liberalism.
The amazing thing about the interwebs -- and I'm sorry if this comes as a shock to you -- is that it's actually quite international.
If you use terms like "our much-vaunted freedoms" on a US web site talking to an American, don't complain if people naturally assume you're referring to American freedoms.
No, it isn't my definition, it is the commonly accepted definition. Go look it up.
So, Ouroboros-like, if one prehistoric person enslaves another prehistoric person, then the former has instituted a form of government, and therefore governments create slavery!
Governments create slavery, not in the sense of "inventing it", but in the sense of "causing it". In particular, US and European slavery were clearly creations of legislatures, rather than the free market.
You then brought up the red herring on the unsupported notion that somehow in pre-historic times that was no government. You're welcome to try to prove your thesis that an excess of liberalism and an absence of government caused slavery in prehistoric times. Go ahead.
It is a fabulous libertarian wank-fest, and I hope you found release in describing it.... You should have been an Oxbridge philosophy don, with logic like that.
Gosh, you're almost a perfect caricature of the ignorance, arrogance, and narrow-mindedness of Europeans.
The bit about slavery here is an absolute corker, by the way. I'm very pleased to learn that you have unparalleled insight into human pre-history, and can state definitively that prior to legislatures being created, humans not only did not enslave other humans, but could not do so.
The error there is in your faulty understanding of the term "government". "Government" doesn't refer (only) to legislatures, but any system of human control over a community. Despotism is a form of government and has existed since prehistory, and, of course, has a predilection for slavery.
Government stands in contrast to voluntary exchanges of goods and services, as they occur in a free market. Voluntary exchanges and free markets don't involve control and don't produce slavery.
and not just how you would like it to be (a libertarian want-fest version of the US that has never actually existed, to take another random example)
I'm sorry, but you really need to read more carefully. As I pointed out: the ability of local and state legislatures "to set rules for doing business in a locality"... is universal throughout the world (including the US); I merely pointed out that it is not a freedom, as you claimed, but a limit on freedom, and that, given its universality, nobody would have any cause to "vaunt" it.
I know it's uncomfortable, but it is really quite important to acknowledge cognitive bias and attempt to see the world as it is
I doubt that you know that it is uncomfortable since you fail to acknowledge your cognitive bias or attempt to see the world as it is. Being originally from outside the US (in fact, Europe) myself, I understand why. But, believe me, it is possible to overcome your biases and indoctrination. Reading and understanding the Enlightenment philosophers might be a good start.
(1) You are on a US web site, and (2) I'm American. So if you talk about "our" liberties, yes, I assume it's about the US. If you didn't mean that then you need to be clearer.
It's clear that you are one of these people who genuinely believes in Randianesque libertarianism
No, I simply believe in classical, Enlightenment era liberalism.
You know, I almost hate to mention it, but... you do seem to have a bit of an issue conflating the world with the US, and the US with a libertarian wank-fantasy that bears no resemblance to historical, present or likely future reality.
Having grown up in Europe and spent part of my youth in a communist country, I assure you I have a firm grasp on liberties in both the US and abroad. And while the US is far from a libertarian paradise, I certainly don't want it to turn into the kind of shithole that I grew up in, even if you may be ignorant and deluded enough to consider such a place "free".
I would argue that far too often in the world the system is rigged or cheated. People too often lie cheat and steal and use unfair advantage against one another.
You're quite right, "the system" is frequently rigged: subsidies, regressive taxation, tax breaks for the rich, regulatory capture, monopolies, failing public schools, business licensing, etc., all government restrictions and interference in free markets.
I'n my world I see far too may people who come from extreme privilege crow about how they are self made and complain about other they call "losers" who aren't as prosperous as themselves as being parasites.
Well, not traveling in those circles I wouldn't know, so I have to take your word for what the kind of people "in your world" say. I think the company you keep tells a lot about you, as does your feverish desire to signal that you are different and that you care.
Spend a little time with those who are still striving you might develop a little empathy and start to see that they are working twice as hard as you do and getting a fraction as much for their hard work.
Funny, that's just what I'd suggest to you, because you express the usual arrogant, self-serving, and ignorant beliefs of the privileged American upper middle class.
The parallel array stuff in later Fortrans are really neat. But last time I looked, doing it explicitly yourself with MPI in FORTRAN77 was still quite a bit faster. Have compilers improved to the point where that speed difference is mostly gone?
You're thinking coarrays; that's only one of several parallel programming facilities.
Coarray performance depends on the hardware and compiler. For MPI-like setups, you can use OpenCoarrays, which simply maps coarray code into MPI code, so performance should be similar.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right: your specific proposal doesn't work, but your specific proposal is bullshit, starting with the fact that corporate profits aren't like income tax. It didn't seem worth pointing that out.
What I was saying is that wealthy individuals have many ways of tax avoidance in Europe for capital gains and other "profits", namely by changing their formal place of residence, by creating trusts, and by moving their investments around.
If you earn a regular income from an employer, it is very hard for you to avoid income tax in both Europe and the US. That's how European welfare states are financed: by bleeding their middle class dry because they can't do anything about it.
You're missing the point. You originally said that "The tax man will skin you alive if you try this." But, in fact, individuals have plenty of ways of avoiding paying income and capital gains taxes quite legally. So your notion that corporations are somehow privileged in being able to do this is false.
No, but what does work (and what I was referring to) is setting up trusts and non-profits at home.
The fact that courts interpret laws differently from their plain meaning is not proof that the laws are unclear. (Nevertheless, your understanding of the First Amendment is faulty.)
Taxes are due whether you "take the benefits of those taxes" or not.
You know what damages people's sense of humanity even more? Dying miserably even though modern medical technology could make you well, because some prick called Stuart Newman takes the position that a pig is more important than a human or thinks that a human kidney somehow gives a pig a soul.
I think the law is quite clear and Google is complying with it: these are well-defined companies engaging in well-defined, legal transactions that happen to greatly reduce tax liability.
If France pushes ahead on this, Google will find other ways of reducing its tax liability, and those are likely going to be economically worse for France than not having collected these taxes in the first place.
The real problem is that taxation is an intrinsically flawed concept: forcing people at gunpoint to give money to the state for goods and services they often don't want in the first place simply is not going to work well, ever. People are going to find ways of avoiding taxes if not for any other reason because they don't want to feel like fools. The only reliable way to pay for goods and services is to engage in voluntary exchanges in a free market.
Capital gains are tax-free in Switzerland, and the top federal income tax bracket is 11.5%. Cantonal income tax varies between about 2% and 10%.
You misunderstood. Wealthy Europeans can avoid paying taxes in their own home countries without even the trouble of moving by putting their wealth into trusts.
They live in Switzerland, have a trust-owned estate in Spain, and go back and forth by private jet or chauffeur. Sounds pretty sweet to me. And it's all legal. Besides, wealthy Spaniards have closer tax havens than Switzerland.
In that sense, your distinction is meaningless because people require technology to survive everywhere. That is, climate change then changes nothing.
I can only point you in the right direction; you need to learn this stuff yourself and do your own reading.
The article is about a 9.5C average global temperature increase due to burning all fossil fuel. I'm pointing out that that "average" increase is mostly due to cold areas getting warmer, and that that is a good thing.
It is physically impossible to melt the polar ice caps in 100 years with a 9.5C average temperature increase.
Wealthy individuals in Europe do this all the time: they move to Monaco or Switzerland or the Bahamas and transfer their assets to trusts and not-for-profit companies. It's only the European lower and middle classes that can't escape Europe's massive taxation legally; of course, regular Europeans just lie and cheat on their taxes at much higher rates than Americans.
No, they are simply complying with the law as written.
Citation?
If France tries to change the rules, it first needs to articulate a consistent set of alternative rules. France's new rules seem to boil down to treating the entire sales price of, say, a German-made Mercedes in France as profit and then taxing it at the corporate tax rate. That doesn't seem sensible, and it also seems like companies other than Google might have a problem with it.
Of course, the EU is also shooting itself in the foot if it thinks that changing rules retroactively is a good idea. Legally, they may get away with it, but it will simply sour investors and entrepreneurs even more on investing in Europe; European stocks are performing poorly enough as is.
There is no need to guess or engage in your weird kind of pseudoscience, we can actually just look at climate history to see what the planet is like when it is much warmer.
Inuit and Berber don't use "technology", they just use their brains, their skills, and simple tools.
And that is relevant to climate change... how? Climate increases global average temperatures mostly by increasing temperatures in cold regions. It also causes increased precipitation. Both of those are positive changes.
In fact the absolute maximum is about 80m. It will take about 1-2 millennia for that kind of sea level rise, which means that it is so slow that it simply isn't a problem.
And that's why people should stop babbling about "saving earth". Not only does "earth not care", life on this planet would thrive with a return to warmer temperatures.
Humans evolved during a period of massive and repeated climate change, and civilization developed in the context of massive global warming and climate change. So, going by history, warming and climate change would be good things.
"Saving our earth" from what? Returning to the kind of climate it had throughout most of mammalian and primate evolution?
From Earth's point of view, it's the exceptionally cold climate and massive ice caps that we have had for the last few million years that is the "climate catastrophe".
Because what makes "us as a species" distinct and evolutionarily successful is three things: free will, social evolution, and our ability to shape the environment.
Furthermore, in this case, it's the current climate (polar ice caps, glaciation cycles) that is unusual; if we return to a planetary state without polar ice caps or glaciation cycles, we'd be simply returning the planet to what it was like during most of mammalian and primate evolution.
A rise of 9.5C would certainly cause lots of changes across the world, but it wouldn't "scorch" earth. The term "scorch" implies arid, infertile land. In fact, it would make earth's climate more uniform, more mild, and generally wetter. If the transition period is slow enough (several centuries), this would arguably be a better climate than what we have now. The major cost would be loss of coastal lands due to sea level rise, but that would be even slower than temperature rise. That would probably be more than compensated for by the opening up of large areas with mild climates in the Arctic and the Antarctic.
That's just wrong, for a couple of reasons. First, such climatic conditions existed over long time periods, and not only dinosaurs did fine (until asteroids and volcanoes kille them), but also mammals and primates. Second, among large land animals, humans are the most adaptive to different climates: we can live from the Arctic all the way down to the Sahara.
What the study really tells you is that even if we could burn all fossil fuel (which we can't really), the worst thing that would happen is that we get a warm, wet climate all over the globe and gradual sea level rise that causes cities to slowly move away from the current coastlines over the span of the next thousand years. No doubt this is bad for Miami or NYC real estate corporations with an eye on the long term; for the rest of humanity, it's probably somewhere between neutral to positive.
And I find it just as amazing that you would support regulations that have not been shown to be necessary or effective, yet make drugs astronomically expensive and tremendously slow progress in medicine.
I'm sure some child labor would occur in truly free societies; it's not intrinsically bad.
Parents have lots of moral responsibilities towards their children. But making a moral responsibility a legal obligation is neither necessary nor (usually) effective.
Most people do not consider looking after a child a "burden". The fact that you do is pretty revealing.
You're truly the king of red herrings and straw men.
In European history, a belief in autarky isn't about "being left alone", it's about nationalism, expansionism, and militarism.
Well, based on your postings, you are clearly one of those "wishy-washy newbies" who has no problem in principle with any law, as long as it can be said to "benefit society". European history provides ample examples of where that leads.
As for child labor laws, they are a good thing in the context of an already unfree and dysfunctional society. But an illiberal fix for massive problems caused by lack of liberty in the first place is hardly an instance of liberalism.
If you use terms like "our much-vaunted freedoms" on a US web site talking to an American, don't complain if people naturally assume you're referring to American freedoms.
No, it isn't my definition, it is the commonly accepted definition. Go look it up.
Governments create slavery, not in the sense of "inventing it", but in the sense of "causing it". In particular, US and European slavery were clearly creations of legislatures, rather than the free market.
You then brought up the red herring on the unsupported notion that somehow in pre-historic times that was no government. You're welcome to try to prove your thesis that an excess of liberalism and an absence of government caused slavery in prehistoric times. Go ahead.
Gosh, you're almost a perfect caricature of the ignorance, arrogance, and narrow-mindedness of Europeans.
The error there is in your faulty understanding of the term "government". "Government" doesn't refer (only) to legislatures, but any system of human control over a community. Despotism is a form of government and has existed since prehistory, and, of course, has a predilection for slavery.
Government stands in contrast to voluntary exchanges of goods and services, as they occur in a free market. Voluntary exchanges and free markets don't involve control and don't produce slavery.
I'm sorry, but you really need to read more carefully. As I pointed out: the ability of local and state legislatures "to set rules for doing business in a locality" ... is universal throughout the world (including the US); I merely pointed out that it is not a freedom, as you claimed, but a limit on freedom, and that, given its universality, nobody would have any cause to "vaunt" it.
I doubt that you know that it is uncomfortable since you fail to acknowledge your cognitive bias or attempt to see the world as it is. Being originally from outside the US (in fact, Europe) myself, I understand why. But, believe me, it is possible to overcome your biases and indoctrination. Reading and understanding the Enlightenment philosophers might be a good start.
(1) You are on a US web site, and (2) I'm American. So if you talk about "our" liberties, yes, I assume it's about the US. If you didn't mean that then you need to be clearer.
No, I simply believe in classical, Enlightenment era liberalism.
Having grown up in Europe and spent part of my youth in a communist country, I assure you I have a firm grasp on liberties in both the US and abroad. And while the US is far from a libertarian paradise, I certainly don't want it to turn into the kind of shithole that I grew up in, even if you may be ignorant and deluded enough to consider such a place "free".
You're quite right, "the system" is frequently rigged: subsidies, regressive taxation, tax breaks for the rich, regulatory capture, monopolies, failing public schools, business licensing, etc., all government restrictions and interference in free markets.
Well, not traveling in those circles I wouldn't know, so I have to take your word for what the kind of people "in your world" say. I think the company you keep tells a lot about you, as does your feverish desire to signal that you are different and that you care.
Funny, that's just what I'd suggest to you, because you express the usual arrogant, self-serving, and ignorant beliefs of the privileged American upper middle class.
You're thinking coarrays; that's only one of several parallel programming facilities.
Coarray performance depends on the hardware and compiler. For MPI-like setups, you can use OpenCoarrays, which simply maps coarray code into MPI code, so performance should be similar.