"You realise that what was practiced in the USSR didn't even remotely resemble the theoretical principle of communism"
Of course I do. Not only on the obvious way, but even in *their* own account. There's no "C" in USSR, is there?
"What you're describing is fascism"
Not by a far account. There was no collusion from private companies in State affairs in USSR; there was no banning of private property in Italy. There was no attempt for a "scientific" method towards progress in Italy; Marxist dialectic was central to USSR. There was no specific cornerstone on nationalism in USSR; it was a central discourse in Italy...
"Homer said it right: "In theory communism works. In theory!""
He could also said as well "In theory capitalism works. In theory!"
The fact that both Stalinist USSR and Fascist Italia were both tyirannies and, therefore, share some aspects doesn't make fascism become plutocratic communism nor the other way around.
"That's not communism. You're describing fascism."
No. I was describing USSR *and* corporations. You can call USSR fascist if you want. The fact that I was not describing communism-by-the-book should be obvious to whoever wants to understand what I was describing; the hint was there.
"Central planning in a corporation is done not by a committee responsible to the lower ranks in the corporate society, but to personal and outside money interests."
In USSR the politburo was not responsible to the lower ranks; they were only responsible to themselves. Just like a board of directors. External money can set the situation of a corporation on the market, just like Korea War set USSR presence (or absence) in the political world, but the politburo was responsible for themselves just like a board of directors is responsible to themselves too.
"Similarly, in a corporation workers tend not to own the means of production"
No, they don't at all. It is the corporation the owner of the assets -full stop. Where the money comes from is a different issue.
"Democracy... Oh boy... That one is a prerequisite of a prerequisite for communism. Literally."
Yeah, I remember the 1919 ballots in Russia.
"Control of the government MUST be in the hands of the people for any kind of a community-based system."
You can shout that to Stalin all you want.
"Why do you think all those supposedly communist regimes kept sticking "People's republic of..." or "Democratic this or that..." in front of the name of the country?"
For exactly the same reasons all those corporations have present those statements of mission, vision and values on their main website.
"Free market disallowed? WTF are you even talking about here? Free market within a corporation? Of what? Lunches? Office supplies?"
On whatever. If I think I can do a better job than the CFO, I could open my financial dpt. alongside; or I could compete on that project that went to a different department, or I can think of my own portfolio of services for the public. I won't be allowed just the same I couldn't open a sugar factory in USSR without not only the politburo's placet but even without their command.
"That's clearly veering off into description of a totalitarian system there"
You are starting to understand. Yes, so-called communist regimes were -and are, totalitarian. And they are totalitarian in a way very much copied by corporations.
"you ARE forgetting to add an essential feature of a corporation - a battle royale competition with outside interests."
AAANDDD, it seems you are forgeting that little thing that went by the name of "Cold War".
"I.e. State of perpetual war with the final goal not of peace, liberation or even dominion - but of expansion through destruction and/or absorption of opposition."
Your are making my argument, don't you?
"Communism, again, would be closer to a hippy collective... a commune if you will."
Oh, yes. "hippy commune" is pronounce "Gulag" in Russian.
Just for the record: no, I was not saying corporations self-organize like "communism" in the sense of Marxist utopias but "communism" like in Stalin's USSR.
"You thought 1984 was describing communism, yet here you have the most successful capitalist corporation engaging in its methods."
That's no news. *Every* single corporation chooses communism for its internal organization. How is it, then, that they shout north and south communism not working and/or being evil's incarnation? * Central planning? check * Ownership of the means of production? check * Democracy disallowed? check * Free market disallowed? check * Punishment of dissidents? check * Messages about the common benefit being above the individuals? check * Gross unbalance of power and perks favoring the politburo? check * Control of public speech to disallow anything but the party's mantras? check
"Read the article again. The whole reason they are considering the non-datasci people is - they literally cannot FIND a "real data scientist" to hire!"
Because, for them, a "real data scientist" is, more or less, like a "devops progammer": an entelechy. I've developed neural networks for behaviour adaptation; I used Haussdorff dimensions to get quick insights on systems changing patterns; I managed systems entropy, a variety of statistical tools (anova, principal component analysis...)... and, still, I am no a "data scientist" -I don't use Macs and I'm 50 y.o.
"I totally understand why a company would want to put all remote offices into a private company VPN"
But the key of this attack was not VPN, the general concept. It was physical access coupled to "... malicious services created using msfvenom [...] If they encountered a whitelisting that could not be bypassed, or PowerShell was blocked on the target computer, the cybercriminals used impacket, and winexesvc.exe or psexec.exe to run executable files remotely."
Or, in other words, another Windows-vector attack.
I also totally understand why a company would want to put all remote offices into a private company VPN (which doesn't preclude to be properly segmented). What it's totally incomprehensible is why they insist in using Windows.
"Granted you don't need many passengers but I think it's a really shallow pool of customers that could run out, once it actually becomes possible."
There are about 15 million people in US with at least one million in free assets (money to expend) or about 16 millions in the whole world with 30 millions or more. 16 million people around the world is too low a target for, say, a social network, but quite enough for a 100.000$ per-run business.
"There is plenty of precedent for others to refuse, stores will no longer accept a bag full of pennies, no shortage of gambling establishments will only accept their own tokens, coupons, and chips."
Now, what would you think of me answering just this? "I've heard of all sorts of bad precedents."
"Or to push a political agenda and force people to act in a manner there isn't any sane reason they should."
Maybe.
Now: what are sane reasons or insane ones? Moreso: who are you to tell me if *my* reasons to force people to act this way or the other are sane or not?
No, it isn't: ask the Swiss. You may very well disagree with such kind of laws, as you are perfectly entitled in principle to reject any part of the social contract -at your own peril, but that's exactly why the law exists.
"There is no ethical use of a law forcing people to [whatever]"
That's what you say. But law is exactly that: forcing people to [something]. Well, not exactly forcing, but declaring what the payment for some actions will be, in the hope you'll see them as not worthwhile (that there's a law against murdering does not preclude you doing it; it just states what society is committed to do against those that do it). If you happen to agree with the law, its spirit and application, that's a bonus -but just a bonus.
"No other person is better than you"
Which goes both ways: you are no better than any other person.
"The best use of law is to protect your ability to make those choices and decide what acting civilized means for yourself."
I sincerely think that, since there's only one life to live, nothing should preclude me to take the most of it, as there won't be any other time nor place to do it but here and now. If you happen to be what takes me apart from my free pursuit of happiness you may very well die and take out of my way. I even think my argument to be self-evident like that of all men being created equal and independent, therefore I hold this truth to be sacred and undeniable for others to behave in exactly this same way that I concede to myself (oh, but I happen to be the first-born of a powerful warlord, so good luck with that).
What I mean is, in the end, there will be things when you will have your very reasonable arguments (to you, at least), and I will have my own (I mean, the *really* reasonable ones... to me, at least). Now what?
"It's really just the government's way of asserting that "this is not just a piece of paper, it's money.""
It's a bit more than this: "...for *all* debts". On one hand, the fact that bank notes is "money" doesn't preclude other "things" being money, but, on the other, is legal money in any and all cases and, thus, should be accepted.
Of course, the government was probably not thinking on all corner cases, but I think it was indeed thinking of a case very relevant to this one, as the main use case for that phrase can be theatralized like this: - Here, the money I owe you. - No, no, no... I *insist* you pay me in minted gold. - Sorry man, you are unlucky because The Government insists that I surely can pay you with these pieces of paper and you have no recourse: either you accept them or resign the debt.
Now, change "minted gold" for "credit card". We may have forgotten this original meaning, and we made things no better by going against it in some "common case" scenarios since, for instance, we find natural somebody not accepting a big note, say 100$, much less 1000$ (if even the receiver knew it's still legal tender), for a little payment (well, not to give change, to be precise, not exactly the same, but still...).
"But what if I was a low-income New Yorker who has no access to a card?" [...] it can be racially exclusionary in practice."
So being short on money is a race now? Or is it that you are biased on that some race associates with the inability to make money? 1) You are a fucking racist. 2) USA has a problem when simple social problems need to be disguised as something else for somebody to do something about them.
"No, my understanding is that he retained his crown in classic chess due to the fact that after an all-draw match in classic chess he won a match in speed chess, validating the OP's statement."
In fact, no, it doesn't. Historically, a challenger in chess must win the champion to take his title: a draw meant the 'statu quo' is to be preserved; the current champion retains his crown, that is. So, compared to past championships, Caruana would have already lost by the end of the "standard" phase, but he got another oportunity at the rapid games phase, which he also lost.
"You may as well argue that banks are trash because once they stockpile enough cash and valuables in their vault, it becomes profitable for someone to put together an armed crew and rob them at gunpoint."
Why do you think commercial buildings, being them banks or shops only want to retain as little money and for a shortest time as possible?
You think you are debunking his argument but you are making it stronger. Unless there was a means *not* to stock enough physical money at a single place that would be exactly the outcome you'd get. Of course, it's not a black-and-white situation, but an adoption curve. Take wild wild west: bank robbering every week (because of the perceived cost of gun robbering being below the perceived profits) and people resorting to bartering and putting their savings under their mattresses. It's not a simple solution either: in order to going out of wild west a lot of things worked together: better physical security on banks to increase entry cost; relatively less physical money at each place with more non-physical transactions; higher expending in police, increasing costs not only for the action itself but for the use of the profits; better social stability, which offered less costly means of earning a life than robbering...
So unless you find the equivalent of not having enough cash at a place to make it profitable for bitcoins, yeah, parent post's outcome is to be expected.
"So you are hoping for even more wild swing in value of a purported 'currency' that people are going to trust. You're not doing Bitcoin's case for becoming a stable currency people trust as a means for exchange any kind of favor. In the revolutionary (non-corrupt) days of the Soviet Republic, they lined speculators up against the wall."
My opinion of bitcoins as currency is not any higher than yours, but this is as much a strawman argument as it can get.
His argument was not that bitcoin was a good currency because of its speculative prospects but that speculation could very well be the means for bitcoin to become mainstream. Those that get on board early would get the speculative profits while later adopters would use it just as expected for a currency at whatever the exchange rate it happens to be stable enough.
The same would happen for, i.e. a "blue chip" stock: those that went into, say, Google early on may become millionaires while those buying it today (with more or less a stable valuation) would "merely" use it for its long-term retirement founds' value -note that it was the speculative phase the one that allowed this stock its growth to reach its current strong and stable status.
"I still don't agree with the POSIX standard that allows root to write to mode 000 files."
I probably agree with your rationale. The semantics of 000 are fairly clear, so it seems there's no reason to "overwrite" them just because (specially when a root user could easily change back the file's permissions before editing it).
But then, there is chattr (or chflags) to deal with that case. I think they are no POSIX-compliant, though.
"problem is business to business transactions are not subject to VAT."
Of course they are. That's why it is called value ADDED tax.
"Actually what i'd do is make it a combined purchase and sales tax for business to business transactions so the buyer and seller each pay half."
I don't know where did you get your idea of how VAT works but, basically you reached the nut of the problem: no matter where you tax, it is always finally translated to the end buyer. The consequence is that, because of that, it makes sense taxing where it's easier to collect: that's why indirect taxes (like your proposal) are so popular: they are very easy to collect . A very different question is the ethics of such recollection -a government should collect a tax just because it's easy for them to collect it?
"That way the taxman can easily check how much tax one business paid in sales against how much the other paid in buying and use those number as a fraud prevention mechanism."
That's basically (almost) how VAT works: you pay for what you sell and discount by what you buy. Easy peasy. And back to square one: you proposal IS already implemented and still is far from producing the output you expect.
I have another idea: any law proposal should come with a clear statement of intentions, how to measure its success and a time frame in which its goals are to be achieved. Failing the metrics in the given time frame implies its immediate repeal.
"It's actually very easy. You tax the companies for the products that are sold to UK customers. Your UK branch sells 1000$ iphones to 20 000 000 UK customers in one year ? Deal, 2% of 1000 x 20 000 000 tax. Easy peasy. No way to evade"
Easy, indeed. It is in fact so easy, it's already done.
It is called... VAT.
"If every country did that American companies would have nowhere to hide their ill-gotten gains."
VAT exists since long. VAT is exactly what you are asking for. And even then, it seems there still are ways to both directly defrauding in VAT and not being taxed fair enough even if religiously paying it.
There's a saying where I'm from: you'd better use your head for more than resting your hat.
Slashdot Mirror
"You realise that what was practiced in the USSR didn't even remotely resemble the theoretical principle of communism"
Of course I do. Not only on the obvious way, but even in *their* own account. There's no "C" in USSR, is there?
"What you're describing is fascism"
Not by a far account. There was no collusion from private companies in State affairs in USSR; there was no banning of private property in Italy. There was no attempt for a "scientific" method towards progress in Italy; Marxist dialectic was central to USSR. There was no specific cornerstone on nationalism in USSR; it was a central discourse in Italy...
"Homer said it right: "In theory communism works. In theory!""
He could also said as well "In theory capitalism works. In theory!"
"You're describing fascism."
Do I? Did Mussolini abolished private property?
The fact that both Stalinist USSR and Fascist Italia were both tyirannies and, therefore, share some aspects doesn't make fascism become plutocratic communism nor the other way around.
"That's not communism. You're describing fascism."
No. I was describing USSR *and* corporations. You can call USSR fascist if you want. The fact that I was not describing communism-by-the-book should be obvious to whoever wants to understand what I was describing; the hint was there.
"Central planning in a corporation is done not by a committee responsible to the lower ranks in the corporate society, but to personal and outside money interests."
In USSR the politburo was not responsible to the lower ranks; they were only responsible to themselves. Just like a board of directors. External money can set the situation of a corporation on the market, just like Korea War set USSR presence (or absence) in the political world, but the politburo was responsible for themselves just like a board of directors is responsible to themselves too.
"Similarly, in a corporation workers tend not to own the means of production"
No, they don't at all. It is the corporation the owner of the assets -full stop. Where the money comes from is a different issue.
"Democracy... Oh boy... That one is a prerequisite of a prerequisite for communism. Literally."
Yeah, I remember the 1919 ballots in Russia.
"Control of the government MUST be in the hands of the people for any kind of a community-based system."
You can shout that to Stalin all you want.
"Why do you think all those supposedly communist regimes kept sticking "People's republic of..." or "Democratic this or that..." in front of the name of the country?"
For exactly the same reasons all those corporations have present those statements of mission, vision and values on their main website.
"Free market disallowed? WTF are you even talking about here? Free market within a corporation? Of what? Lunches? Office supplies?"
On whatever. If I think I can do a better job than the CFO, I could open my financial dpt. alongside; or I could compete on that project that went to a different department, or I can think of my own portfolio of services for the public. I won't be allowed just the same I couldn't open a sugar factory in USSR without not only the politburo's placet but even without their command.
"That's clearly veering off into description of a totalitarian system there"
You are starting to understand. Yes, so-called communist regimes were -and are, totalitarian. And they are totalitarian in a way very much copied by corporations.
"you ARE forgetting to add an essential feature of a corporation - a battle royale competition with outside interests."
AAANDDD, it seems you are forgeting that little thing that went by the name of "Cold War".
"I.e. State of perpetual war with the final goal not of peace, liberation or even dominion - but of expansion through destruction and/or absorption of opposition."
Your are making my argument, don't you?
"Communism, again, would be closer to a hippy collective... a commune if you will."
Oh, yes. "hippy commune" is pronounce "Gulag" in Russian.
Just for the record: no, I was not saying corporations self-organize like "communism" in the sense of Marxist utopias but "communism" like in Stalin's USSR.
"You thought 1984 was describing communism, yet here you have the most successful capitalist corporation engaging in its methods."
That's no news. *Every* single corporation chooses communism for its internal organization. How is it, then, that they shout north and south communism not working and/or being evil's incarnation?
* Central planning? check
* Ownership of the means of production? check
* Democracy disallowed? check
* Free market disallowed? check
* Punishment of dissidents? check
* Messages about the common benefit being above the individuals? check
* Gross unbalance of power and perks favoring the politburo? check
* Control of public speech to disallow anything but the party's mantras? check
"Read the article again. The whole reason they are considering the non-datasci people is - they literally cannot FIND a "real data scientist" to hire!"
Because, for them, a "real data scientist" is, more or less, like a "devops progammer": an entelechy. I've developed neural networks for behaviour adaptation; I used Haussdorff dimensions to get quick insights on systems changing patterns; I managed systems entropy, a variety of statistical tools (anova, principal component analysis...)... and, still, I am no a "data scientist" -I don't use Macs and I'm 50 y.o.
"I totally understand why a company would want to put all remote offices into a private company VPN"
But the key of this attack was not VPN, the general concept. It was physical access coupled to "... malicious services created using msfvenom [...] If they encountered a whitelisting that could not be bypassed, or PowerShell was blocked on the target computer, the cybercriminals used impacket, and winexesvc.exe or psexec.exe to run executable files remotely."
Or, in other words, another Windows-vector attack.
I also totally understand why a company would want to put all remote offices into a private company VPN (which doesn't preclude to be properly segmented). What it's totally incomprehensible is why they insist in using Windows.
"It's really only shocking it took so long."
No, it isn't. These kind of plays have a staggering number of combinations, so brute attack approaches are absurdly costly.
And then, while it looks "easy" to optimize a program for a single game, this one works against all of them -that's quite high grade stuff.
"Whatever side (human, AI or otherwise) that's smart enough to play the winning move. "
Define "winning move".
I'll prefer the one that plays the move that makes me survive.
"Granted you don't need many passengers but I think it's a really shallow pool of customers that could run out, once it actually becomes possible."
There are about 15 million people in US with at least one million in free assets (money to expend) or about 16 millions in the whole world with 30 millions or more. 16 million people around the world is too low a target for, say, a social network, but quite enough for a 100.000$ per-run business.
"Don't put an arbitrary deadline on your people and yourself."
He didn't. Before Christmas... which year?
"There is plenty of precedent for others to refuse, stores will no longer accept a bag full of pennies, no shortage of gambling establishments will only accept their own tokens, coupons, and chips."
Now, what would you think of me answering just this? "I've heard of all sorts of bad precedents."
Oh, the irony!
"Or to push a political agenda and force people to act in a manner there isn't any sane reason they should."
Maybe.
Now: what are sane reasons or insane ones? Moreso: who are you to tell me if *my* reasons to force people to act this way or the other are sane or not?
"No, the draft is a bad use of law."
No, it isn't: ask the Swiss. You may very well disagree with such kind of laws, as you are perfectly entitled in principle to reject any part of the social contract -at your own peril, but that's exactly why the law exists.
"There is no ethical use of a law forcing people to [whatever]"
That's what you say. But law is exactly that: forcing people to [something]. Well, not exactly forcing, but declaring what the payment for some actions will be, in the hope you'll see them as not worthwhile (that there's a law against murdering does not preclude you doing it; it just states what society is committed to do against those that do it). If you happen to agree with the law, its spirit and application, that's a bonus -but just a bonus.
"No other person is better than you"
Which goes both ways: you are no better than any other person.
"The best use of law is to protect your ability to make those choices and decide what acting civilized means for yourself."
I sincerely think that, since there's only one life to live, nothing should preclude me to take the most of it, as there won't be any other time nor place to do it but here and now. If you happen to be what takes me apart from my free pursuit of happiness you may very well die and take out of my way. I even think my argument to be self-evident like that of all men being created equal and independent, therefore I hold this truth to be sacred and undeniable for others to behave in exactly this same way that I concede to myself (oh, but I happen to be the first-born of a powerful warlord, so good luck with that).
What I mean is, in the end, there will be things when you will have your very reasonable arguments (to you, at least), and I will have my own (I mean, the *really* reasonable ones... to me, at least). Now what?
"It's really just the government's way of asserting that "this is not just a piece of paper, it's money.""
It's a bit more than this: "...for *all* debts". On one hand, the fact that bank notes is "money" doesn't preclude other "things" being money, but, on the other, is legal money in any and all cases and, thus, should be accepted.
Of course, the government was probably not thinking on all corner cases, but I think it was indeed thinking of a case very relevant to this one, as the main use case for that phrase can be theatralized like this:
- Here, the money I owe you.
- No, no, no... I *insist* you pay me in minted gold.
- Sorry man, you are unlucky because The Government insists that I surely can pay you with these pieces of paper and you have no recourse: either you accept them or resign the debt.
Now, change "minted gold" for "credit card". We may have forgotten this original meaning, and we made things no better by going against it in some "common case" scenarios since, for instance, we find natural somebody not accepting a big note, say 100$, much less 1000$ (if even the receiver knew it's still legal tender), for a little payment (well, not to give change, to be precise, not exactly the same, but still...).
"The law doesn't exist to force people to sacrifice themselves for others as if they should value those others more highly than themselves!"
Are you sure? In two words: military draft.
"It sounds like neither of you understands what that means."
A lot of blah, blah just to say "...and, well, This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private."
"Is there some particular reason these guys should be "thinking of others" in their moves while they try to eek out a living?"
Not at all. Even more: that would be highly unexpected.
And that's one of the reasons why we have laws in place: for people to do the necessary when otherwise they wouldn't be inclined to.
"But what if I was a low-income New Yorker who has no access to a card?" [...] it can be racially exclusionary in practice."
So being short on money is a race now? Or is it that you are biased on that some race associates with the inability to make money?
1) You are a fucking racist.
2) USA has a problem when simple social problems need to be disguised as something else for somebody to do something about them.
"No, my understanding is that he retained his crown in classic chess due to the fact that after an all-draw match in classic chess he won a match in speed chess, validating the OP's statement."
In fact, no, it doesn't. Historically, a challenger in chess must win the champion to take his title: a draw meant the 'statu quo' is to be preserved; the current champion retains his crown, that is. So, compared to past championships, Caruana would have already lost by the end of the "standard" phase, but he got another oportunity at the rapid games phase, which he also lost.
"You may as well argue that banks are trash because once they stockpile enough cash and valuables in their vault, it becomes profitable for someone to put together an armed crew and rob them at gunpoint."
Why do you think commercial buildings, being them banks or shops only want to retain as little money and for a shortest time as possible?
You think you are debunking his argument but you are making it stronger. Unless there was a means *not* to stock enough physical money at a single place that would be exactly the outcome you'd get. Of course, it's not a black-and-white situation, but an adoption curve. Take wild wild west: bank robbering every week (because of the perceived cost of gun robbering being below the perceived profits) and people resorting to bartering and putting their savings under their mattresses. It's not a simple solution either: in order to going out of wild west a lot of things worked together: better physical security on banks to increase entry cost; relatively less physical money at each place with more non-physical transactions; higher expending in police, increasing costs not only for the action itself but for the use of the profits; better social stability, which offered less costly means of earning a life than robbering...
So unless you find the equivalent of not having enough cash at a place to make it profitable for bitcoins, yeah, parent post's outcome is to be expected.
"So you are hoping for even more wild swing in value of a purported 'currency' that people are going to trust.
You're not doing Bitcoin's case for becoming a stable currency people trust as a means for exchange any kind of favor.
In the revolutionary (non-corrupt) days of the Soviet Republic, they lined speculators up against the wall."
My opinion of bitcoins as currency is not any higher than yours, but this is as much a strawman argument as it can get.
His argument was not that bitcoin was a good currency because of its speculative prospects but that speculation could very well be the means for bitcoin to become mainstream. Those that get on board early would get the speculative profits while later adopters would use it just as expected for a currency at whatever the exchange rate it happens to be stable enough.
The same would happen for, i.e. a "blue chip" stock: those that went into, say, Google early on may become millionaires while those buying it today (with more or less a stable valuation) would "merely" use it for its long-term retirement founds' value -note that it was the speculative phase the one that allowed this stock its growth to reach its current strong and stable status.
"And for your non-white markets. Hard physical cash is king."
When has that been the case? Black market only strives on times of trouble and times of trouble bring inflation.
If there's one situation you definitely don't want to depend on hard cash is on an inflationary economy.
"I still don't agree with the POSIX standard that allows root to write to mode 000 files."
I probably agree with your rationale. The semantics of 000 are fairly clear, so it seems there's no reason to "overwrite" them just because (specially when a root user could easily change back the file's permissions before editing it).
But then, there is chattr (or chflags) to deal with that case. I think they are no POSIX-compliant, though.
"problem is business to business transactions are not subject to VAT."
Of course they are. That's why it is called value ADDED tax.
"Actually what i'd do is make it a combined purchase and sales tax for business to business transactions so the buyer and seller each pay half."
I don't know where did you get your idea of how VAT works but, basically you reached the nut of the problem: no matter where you tax, it is always finally translated to the end buyer. The consequence is that, because of that, it makes sense taxing where it's easier to collect: that's why indirect taxes (like your proposal) are so popular: they are very easy to collect . A very different question is the ethics of such recollection -a government should collect a tax just because it's easy for them to collect it?
"That way the taxman can easily check how much tax one business paid in sales against how much the other paid in buying and use those number as a fraud prevention mechanism."
That's basically (almost) how VAT works: you pay for what you sell and discount by what you buy. Easy peasy. And back to square one: you proposal IS already implemented and still is far from producing the output you expect.
I have another idea: any law proposal should come with a clear statement of intentions, how to measure its success and a time frame in which its goals are to be achieved. Failing the metrics in the given time frame implies its immediate repeal.
"It's actually very easy. You tax the companies for the products that are sold to UK customers. Your UK branch sells 1000$ iphones to 20 000 000 UK customers in one year ? Deal, 2% of 1000 x 20 000 000 tax. Easy peasy. No way to evade"
Easy, indeed. It is in fact so easy, it's already done.
It is called... VAT.
"If every country did that American companies would have nowhere to hide their ill-gotten gains."
VAT exists since long. VAT is exactly what you are asking for. And even then, it seems there still are ways to both directly defrauding in VAT and not being taxed fair enough even if religiously paying it.
There's a saying where I'm from: you'd better use your head for more than resting your hat.