Better yet, outlaw curtains and make all new housing construction out of clear acrylics. Then outlaw clothes and mandate full body scanners to prevent anybody from carrying a concealed weapon.
Even Syrians need to pay taxes and watch youtube videos featuring cats.
More the second than the former, I'm thinking. Hell, flood the world with cheap computers and internet access. If everybody is checking out Lolcats, they'll be too damned busy to shoot anybody. Just make sure the female cats are dressed in a hijab and we should be golden.
Well that's an amusing comic without a doubt. Except when you look at what other weapons become used. An example, in Canada the most common instrument ranking number 1 is blunt force trauma, with a variety of "weapons" blades and so on I believe rank 3.
So, have they banned hockey sticks in Canada except for licensed and registered members of the NHL?
As long as they vote the way their consituents want them to, I think they are effectively doing their job correctly. It's only when they take corporate money, and don't listen to the people that they are doing it wrong.
The problem is, their constituents are corporations, not meat citizens.
Much as I dislike the way Google, Apple, Microsoft et al operate in this regard, it is up to the legislature to create their laws precisely and carefully - and in this case clearly the tax laws need to be amended.
You don't think the corporations bought the law just like they did in the US?
How is that a smear? Stemcor paid £157k in tax on revenue of £2.1 billion. Given that corporate tax in the UK is 24% on profits, this means that Stemcor made a profit of £654k. A £654,000 profit on top of £2.1 billion in revenue is laughable and utterly unbelievable.
Stemcore in the movie business? To hear the Hollywood studios talk, they haven't made a dime in profits in over a hundred years.
If someone thought the law was actually being broken, then the right thing to do is for HMRC to prosecute. Not summon random executives to "explain themselves" to Parliament. That's a waste of time that is guaranteed to achieve nothing.
That's because Parliament wants to look like they're doing something rather than upsetting their campaign contributers and actually doing something. We see a lot of that in Congress over here across the pond.
They're a corporation. A corporation has more rights than you do in the US. So be a good little meat citizen and worship your local corporation, and pray they don't figure out how to move your job to some Third World toilet to inch their profit margins up.
Yes, our legal system is very seriously fucked. Yes, the police are more janitor than guardian. An alternative is 'pre-crime', arrest anybody who is capable of committing a crime. With our legal system, anybody can be arrested for a crime. Shall we extend that to anyone thinking of committing a crime? We're already jailing 5 times as many people as the rest of the world, shall we just put up walls with guard towers on them at the borders and admit we're a police state already?
Whether to fund paleontology with tax dollars is a legitimate question. I happen to think dinosaurs rock and I can afford to pay my share of Jack Horner's salary, but a reasonable person might feel that the money could be better spent maintaining bridges or something.
I would welcome that kind of discussion. What I don't welcome is political maneuvering to hijack a federal agency to serve a minority interest.
While cutting funding for paleontology to fund repairing bridges might sound reasonable, odds are, the funds siphoned away most likely won't be used to repair those bridges. Not when there's an election around the corner and there's pork to spread to buy votes. Not when defense contractors need their corporate welfare fix.
I'm saying by evading their fair share of taxes, they deprive Washington State of revenue for services such as police, education, roads, and so forth. This is not trivial shit. By evading taxes on the federal level, they deprive the federal government of revenue for services such as defense, infrastructure rebuilding/repair, and so forth.
No, not science... just speculation.
They specifically said that they didn't measure actual field emissions (that's the science part).
The EPA didn't. They took somebody's word that they did the measurements and accepted the results on face value. Considering the main thrust of this is from an industry-backed report, I find it very suspicious.
"The EPA said it made the changes based on expert reviews and new data from several sources, including a report funded by the oil and gas industry.
Note the "several sources" and "a report funded by the oil and gas industry".
So, no, it's not just an industry report behind this. It might be *gasp* actual science.
Those sources were 'expert reviews' of unnamed experts. Where are the peer-reviewed articles? Where are the links that show somebody, anybody did real live science on this instead of an industry-backed report and 'expert reviews'? If it's not peer-reviewed, it's not verifiable.
For instance, I could claim I built a flying saucer in my back yard, complete with working antigravity thrusters and a ftl drive. Without peer review, it would be proper to call me a fake until I proved my work to physicists.
The shareholders have been granted a massive privilege: the opportunity to make money with no liability for wrongdoing
I don't think you understand what limited liability means.
Actually, I think he does. When you incorporate as an LLC and something catastrophic happens, the LLC is nailed and likely killed while the owners remain relatively untouched.
But isn't there something just a little wrong with the idea that there are morally no limits to what the State can extract from a for-profit corporation?
I'm thinking it's the other way around. Microsoft and most if not all corporations try to hide as much taxable income as they can. Microsoft is famous for this. So where does this 'extraction' by the State happen?
Yes, but it's not MS that caused Nokia to tank and it's not MS that is causing USA to tank either. Pretty bad timing though, I would not have taken that job unless I was given a green light to cut all government spending close to 0.
If Microsoft isn't paying its fair share of taxes, how is this not causing Washington state and the US as a whole not to tank? If they're playing the money shuffle game to keep from paying billions, and lawyering the government to death to keep from paying fines, how is this not affecting everyone through loss of revenue and wasted government spending in failed attempts to collect fines levied against them by the courts?
A 7 minute trailer distributed by bittorrent (After all, that's about all it will be equivilent to) gets the *AA up inside themselves? Good deal.
Reminds me of when the Dawn of the Dead remake came out a few years ago. They had a deal where they showed the first 10 minutes of the film on USA to help promote the movie (and it worked, at least for me). To me, this is exactly the same thing, just distributed and shown through a different mechanism.
Exactly. And it's the fact that it's being done by bittorrent rather than through approved *AA channels that has them pissing themselves. It shows just how relevant their business model really is.
Slashdot Mirror
Better yet, outlaw curtains and make all new housing construction out of clear acrylics. Then outlaw clothes and mandate full body scanners to prevent anybody from carrying a concealed weapon.
4. Use a large club. Remember, first you have to get their attention...
Club? Axe surely? (it's management, taking one of these beasties to IT spending is something they're familiar with)
Nononono. Club. You don't wanna kill them, you wanna get them to sign the authorisation forms and the checks.
4. Use a large club. Remember, first you have to get their attention...
Even Syrians need to pay taxes and watch youtube videos featuring cats.
More the second than the former, I'm thinking. Hell, flood the world with cheap computers and internet access. If everybody is checking out Lolcats, they'll be too damned busy to shoot anybody. Just make sure the female cats are dressed in a hijab and we should be golden.
Well that's an amusing comic without a doubt. Except when you look at what other weapons become used. An example, in Canada the most common instrument ranking number 1 is blunt force trauma, with a variety of "weapons" blades and so on I believe rank 3.
So, have they banned hockey sticks in Canada except for licensed and registered members of the NHL?
As long as they vote the way their consituents want them to, I think they are effectively doing their job correctly. It's only when they take corporate money, and don't listen to the people that they are doing it wrong.
The problem is, their constituents are corporations, not meat citizens.
Welcome to Louisiana, where both science and education are endangered species...
I thought that case was in Scandanavia someplace. Sweden, IIRC, which struck me as ironic because Sweden was the home of The Pirate Bay...
Much as I dislike the way Google, Apple, Microsoft et al operate in this regard, it is up to the legislature to create their laws precisely and carefully - and in this case clearly the tax laws need to be amended.
You don't think the corporations bought the law just like they did in the US?
How is that a smear? Stemcor paid £157k in tax on revenue of £2.1 billion. Given that corporate tax in the UK is 24% on profits, this means that Stemcor made a profit of £654k. A £654,000 profit on top of £2.1 billion in revenue is laughable and utterly unbelievable.
Stemcore in the movie business? To hear the Hollywood studios talk, they haven't made a dime in profits in over a hundred years.
If someone thought the law was actually being broken, then the right thing to do is for HMRC to prosecute. Not summon random executives to "explain themselves" to Parliament. That's a waste of time that is guaranteed to achieve nothing.
That's because Parliament wants to look like they're doing something rather than upsetting their campaign contributers and actually doing something. We see a lot of that in Congress over here across the pond.
They're a corporation. A corporation has more rights than you do in the US. So be a good little meat citizen and worship your local corporation, and pray they don't figure out how to move your job to some Third World toilet to inch their profit margins up.
Yes, our legal system is very seriously fucked. Yes, the police are more janitor than guardian. An alternative is 'pre-crime', arrest anybody who is capable of committing a crime. With our legal system, anybody can be arrested for a crime. Shall we extend that to anyone thinking of committing a crime? We're already jailing 5 times as many people as the rest of the world, shall we just put up walls with guard towers on them at the borders and admit we're a police state already?
Whether to fund paleontology with tax dollars is a legitimate question. I happen to think dinosaurs rock and I can afford to pay my share of Jack Horner's salary, but a reasonable person might feel that the money could be better spent maintaining bridges or something.
I would welcome that kind of discussion. What I don't welcome is political maneuvering to hijack a federal agency to serve a minority interest.
While cutting funding for paleontology to fund repairing bridges might sound reasonable, odds are, the funds siphoned away most likely won't be used to repair those bridges. Not when there's an election around the corner and there's pork to spread to buy votes. Not when defense contractors need their corporate welfare fix.
I'm saying by evading their fair share of taxes, they deprive Washington State of revenue for services such as police, education, roads, and so forth. This is not trivial shit. By evading taxes on the federal level, they deprive the federal government of revenue for services such as defense, infrastructure rebuilding/repair, and so forth.
Cue 'hamster rescue' jokes in 3... 2... 1...
they would steal them!
*sigh* We've been over this before... making exact replicas of PM Seats is not "stealing".
Exactly. It's 'unauthorised copyright infringement'. After all these years, you'd think they'd get it right for once...
No, not science... just speculation. They specifically said that they didn't measure actual field emissions (that's the science part).
The EPA didn't. They took somebody's word that they did the measurements and accepted the results on face value. Considering the main thrust of this is from an industry-backed report, I find it very suspicious.
Note the "several sources" and "a report funded by the oil and gas industry".
So, no, it's not just an industry report behind this. It might be *gasp* actual science.
Those sources were 'expert reviews' of unnamed experts. Where are the peer-reviewed articles? Where are the links that show somebody, anybody did real live science on this instead of an industry-backed report and 'expert reviews'? If it's not peer-reviewed, it's not verifiable.
For instance, I could claim I built a flying saucer in my back yard, complete with working antigravity thrusters and a ftl drive. Without peer review, it would be proper to call me a fake until I proved my work to physicists.
... this surprises anyone how, exactly?
I don't think you understand what limited liability means.
Actually, I think he does. When you incorporate as an LLC and something catastrophic happens, the LLC is nailed and likely killed while the owners remain relatively untouched.
But isn't there something just a little wrong with the idea that there are morally no limits to what the State can extract from a for-profit corporation?
I'm thinking it's the other way around. Microsoft and most if not all corporations try to hide as much taxable income as they can. Microsoft is famous for this. So where does this 'extraction' by the State happen?
Cue Clippy saying 'I see you are trying to balance the state budget. Would you like some help stealing those billions for yourself?'
Yes, but it's not MS that caused Nokia to tank and it's not MS that is causing USA to tank either. Pretty bad timing though, I would not have taken that job unless I was given a green light to cut all government spending close to 0.
If Microsoft isn't paying its fair share of taxes, how is this not causing Washington state and the US as a whole not to tank? If they're playing the money shuffle game to keep from paying billions, and lawyering the government to death to keep from paying fines, how is this not affecting everyone through loss of revenue and wasted government spending in failed attempts to collect fines levied against them by the courts?
A 7 minute trailer distributed by bittorrent (After all, that's about all it will be equivilent to) gets the *AA up inside themselves? Good deal.
Reminds me of when the Dawn of the Dead remake came out a few years ago. They had a deal where they showed the first 10 minutes of the film on USA to help promote the movie (and it worked, at least for me). To me, this is exactly the same thing, just distributed and shown through a different mechanism.
Exactly. And it's the fact that it's being done by bittorrent rather than through approved *AA channels that has them pissing themselves. It shows just how relevant their business model really is.