That's upto the courts to figure out, just as we don't have a fixed definition for "beyond reasonable doubt" when determining whether someone should be found guilty it has to be based on the weight of the evidence presented in the case - it's subjective.
Well the point is that there will have been many panzer divisions, if they capture the pidgeon 100 miles from where it was released, then how do they know which panzer division is working well based on the message? What if they get it wrong and reinforce a panzer division that is instead struggling and just end up throwing a load of extra panzers to the slaughter?
Unless there's something particularly specific in the message (like coordinates that the GGP implied should be contained) then it's still a tough thing to track down, particularly in a battlefield as dynamic as Northern France a short time after D-Day!
I've found it hit and miss really, Amazon UK's CEO was a useless waste of time, he just fobbed me back off to customer services who were the failure of a department that pushed me to contact the CEO in the first place.
In contrast, when I had to contact the CEO of BT because customer services had refused to accept that they had got things wrong and tried to charge me £120 for an engineer visit for a line to be activated even though it was live and didn't need an engineer visit the CEO replied on a Saturday afternoon within an hour from his Blackberry and passed my issue over to someone who was able to get the problem sorted on a Sunday. I was honestly not expecting to hear anything at all until mid-week, so kudos to him, for all BT's faults, the CEO obviously does actually care about customer's complaints and issues.
So ultimately it depends on the company I guess, Amazon just really don't give a toss about bad press, they're happy to fuck up, break the law, whatever, and just keep on rolling like nothing has happened. I eventually had to resort to the courts with Amazon, and of course won, because I was indisputably in the right all along despite their failure to understand and accept that. I'd guess Amazon's recent refusal to change it's ways regarding the bad press it got regarding it's tax dodging is another example of this- they just don't care about bad press so no amount of complaining at any level will get you anywhere.
Yes, and yet, I don't see them whining about Facebook who have outright breached European data protection laws time and time again without serious punishment.
Presumably in part, because of this sort of thing:
"Need somebody with more detail about the battle on this day."
Sadly, less and less such people continue to exist, at least who can give first hand accounts. My grandfather were he alive may have been one such person as he was a Royal Marine Commando motorcycle courier on the front lines active in that region on that day.
He survived the war and had many amazing stories to tell but passed away of old age 5 years ago. Sadly most of even the mementos are lost as the two SS daggers he seized and kept from a pair of captured German officers were stolen from his house a few years before he died.
Exactly, if the HQ in Britain knows which pidgeon is assigned where either by recognising the pidgeon, or because of some identifying mark on the message, or the pidgeon's message tube itself then it would know exactly where "here" was.
It would in fact make far more sense to do it this way, as otherwise if the Nazis caught the pidgeon then they'd know too where the message was being sent from and hence learn that their panzer tactics were working in that area and could hence double up on them.
Including the area in the message seems a particularly silly thing to do in this case, and simply saying "here" is much safer if the pidgeon is identifiable back home.
Yes, it fundamentally depends on how many. If they're talking about a large number of members including some who have merely given financial contribution to the party then that would almost certainly be construed as vexatious litigation as it would be a clear attempt to subdue the party by going after it's funding source- it's members.
If it's just going after the members who actually setup, and maintained the proxy, then you're probably right, it wouldn't be enough.
This said, the vexatious litigant list is arguably under used anyway, Andrew Crossley of ACS law for example who brought suits merely to try and worry people into paying (hence why he tried to exit the suit when it actually came to court) is a clear example of a vexatious litigant, yet for some reason he was never named so like a zombie, could potentially come back from the dead again some day.
"Remember, the default position is that you can only reclaim for expenses which have been incurred "wholly, exclusively and necessarily" in the course of running your company."
Well exactly, he runs a holiday firm, he needs to do market research for that. It's a necessity of running his business. To put it into context, this is like Starbucks offloading it's profits to The Netherlands or wherever for a "royalty" payment to avoid corporation tax. We all know it's a blatant tax dodge, but they have enough plausible deniability to claim otherwise and at that point there's little HMRC can do. If they say "Well you're not selling many holidays" it doesn't really matter- HMRC don't have the power to dictate how competent you should be at making sales and succeeding in business, only to collect tax, he can just claim his business is struggling to make sales and that it's as simple as that, which is why he mostly concentrates on the IT contracting side of the business.
Yes, the problem is that the elements of speech the US has done a better job of protecting are things like being able to protest next to dead soldiers graves and call them and their families "fags". It does however still legislate against many types of speech which is pretty much the same as in Europe. See sections 4 and 5 for a decent overview:
I'm not really convinced that the US is any better off for protecting the speech it does protect that some individual European nations do not. Allowing everyone from the KKK, to the Phelps, to Neo Nazis to say what they want doesn't strike me as having improved the richness of discourse in the US. If anything US political discourse at least seems to be getting ever more populist, and ever more irrational.
These are people who can no longer bring civil suits because they have taken the piss too much. If the BPI files too many frivolous lawsuits it's staff (likely it's lawyers) will find themselves no longer able to practice in civil suits because they will become named on this list.
"You're defending ideas from an era of musket loaders. The 2nd amendment does not at all take into consideration the type of weapons people can get their hands on today."
It's an interesting fallacy the second amendment apologists continue bring up. They seem oblivious to the fact that it doesn't specify a particular type of arms people should have the right to bear, but that just about everyone even avid defenders of gun ownership would normally agree that, for example, you don't have the right to own a nuclear tipped ICBM. Where you then draw the line depends, are you allowed a cruise missile? are you allowed an anti-tank launcher? are you allowed a fully automatic rifle with grenade launcher attachment?, just a fully automatic rifle? and so on. Fundmentally, even gun nuts tend to draw the line somewhere down that path, but they seem to miss the fact that where, is rather arbitrary and subjective.
Like you say, the law would've kind of worked in an era of muskets, but weapons technology gets more advanced, how advanced do gun nuts intend to let it get before they draw the line? The right to bear personal suitcase nukes? What if you're a muslim immigrant from downtown Kandahar with a background of the US military having accidently killed your wife whilst also harbouring extremist and anti-Western views, is it okay that he still carries his proposed suitcase nuke into the centre of times square? Or does some measure of arbitrary control suddenly enter the gun nuts mind?
I don't think they've really thought through their position and the irrationality and hypocrisy of it, or really even thought at all for that matter.
"Too bad Bruce doesn't support your choice to not give up yours. He would benevolently take away everybody's right to self defense by the bearing of arms and not "miss it." Lovely..."
He's not talking about taking anyone's right to self defence, just to own a gun, something which is not necessary for self defence.
When I was in Canada last, speaking to a cop friend there she asked how on earth our police survive by not carrying guns. She asked, what happens when someone comes at them with a knife?
I answer that it's quite simple, they spray CS spray in the guy's face, grab the knife with their slash proof gloves, and them smack the fucker round the back of the head with their night stick.
Stop being a bunch of pussies pretending you need firearms to protect yourself.
"You can try to control them by legislation, but you inevitably end up just making it more difficult for honest citizens to have them."
Yes, and that's exactly the point. The guy who carried out this massacre, and just about every other massacre in the US was an honest citizen until the event.
"Our experience has shown that such "experiments" do little, if anything, to prevent criminals and lunatics from having guns, but we know that they are emboldened by the prospect that others are less likely to have guns. Case in point: this tragedy happened in a so-called "gun-free zone."
This is what one would normally call a lie. In the UK gun crime has drastically decreased as a result of our gun control laws, knife crime has increased in it's place, but nowhere near enough to make up for the drop in gun crime, giving us a large net drop in crimes involving weapons. I'm not sure what your case in point is supposed to mean? The only case in point is that a guy with a legitimately owned weapon yet again murdered a bunch of innocent people. A weapon that he quite likely would not have been able to acquire with sensible gun laws.
Your next paragraph is again just full of completely made up lies and completely counter to the truth, so I wont even waste my time with that one, and for what it's worth I was in the TA (the UK's reserve force) so yes, I know how to handle a gun, but this doesn't change the fact that accidents do happen, and stupidity trumps everything in your argument:
"This discussion won't change anything about today's sad tragedy, but how might this situation have turned out differently if the teachers had been allowed to opt to train with a firearm (if they so chose) and allowed to keep a secure firearm on their person."
Hahahaha, hahahahaha. Yeah, great, then multiply this across every school in the US, and when little Timmy finds teachers gun and accidently blows little Sarah away you can pretend it's because little Timmy wasn't trained, and all kids should be trained in fire arms from birth. You can also pretend that a teacher will trivially be able to draw faster than their attacker, and have time for better training (you know, rather than simply learning to teach better- what they're there for), and when it comes to, actually pull the trigger. Because, you know, even large proportions of trained soldiers struggle to find the courage to shoot at the enemy to make the kill:
As pointed out in the article, you can train them out of this, you can train them to be killers. Because that's exactly what you want, you want primary school teachers trained to be killers and armed.
Well done, you just offered a way of drastically increasing the number of psycopaths in America. Feel free to completely rethink your position, try again, and offer a suggestion a bit more useful next time.
To be fair, O'Dwyer largely only has himself to blame though. In accepting the deal with the US to pay them $20,000 and promise not to break any US laws again (which is fucking sick, since when did the US get to hold British citizens to US legal standards?) he ended the situation early, but didn't let enough pressure build on Theresa May to go the same route.
I think it's almost a certainty that O'Dwyer's extradition would also have been blocked eventually once appeals etc. were exhausted and enough political pressure exerted, but he didn't let it reach that point. I sympathise with why he didn't, but I think the deal he accepted was pretty fucking stupid, as he signed an agreement that means he can now be extradited to the US for breaking a US law in the UK that is not a crime here.
Potentially, if he was jaywalking in the UK (not an actual crime in the UK) that could now give the US reason to extradite him again. Whether they'd actually do that I guess depends on what he does with his life now, but there strikes me as something very wrong with the deal he accepted.
Still, I can sympathise with why he accepted it- to get it all over and done with, but I'm intrigued to see if it turns round and bites him sometime in the future, I wouldn't want that deal hanging over my head as it strikes me as almost as bad as the extradition itself hanging over you.
Quite possibly no, he didn't. The quote from the CPS:
"The potential difficulties in bringing a case in England and Wales now should not be underestimated, not least the passage of time, the logistics of transferring sensitive evidence prepared for a court in the US to London for trial, the participation of US government witnesses in the trial and the need fully to comply with the duties of disclosure imposed on the CPS.
The prospects of a conviction against Mr McKinnon which reflects the full extent of his alleged criminality are not high."
Which basically says that whilst the US claimed all those things, there was basically no chance of the US being able to prove any of it to be actually true to the standards required in a British court.
That doesn't really instill confidence, if he'd done so much damage you'd have thought they'd be able to at least bring some witnesses, and some evidence over to prove at least some degree of criminality. The fact they can't even prove the slightest bit of it to gain at least some kind of conviction really talks for itself.
As is normal in cases like this the prosecution throws everything they can at the defendant to see what will stick. In this case the CPS (the UK's prosecution) judged that it's very likely that absolutely none of it will actually stick.
The only thing that would even be a grey area is the holiday thing (though it sounds like you're implying the rest is? of course it's not- everything else I suggested is accepted by HMRC as genuine costs of doing business), but even that's perfectly legal (though I agree immoral) because he is actually selling holidays.
It sounds, if anything, that you largely agree with the original point I was making here though if you personally don't make these deductions - that many of us could decrease our tax bill and do so legally, but to most of us it's immoral, and so we stick to only legitimate claims. But this is exactly the sort of thing we're talking about from Amazon, Google, Starbucks et. al. the stuff they do is technically legal, like the holiays dodge, but very much immoral by most people's standards.
My point wasn't that those who handle their own tax affairs are necessarily tax dodgers which, I believe is the view you felt I was pushing given your original post, but simply that just about anyone in the UK can decrease their tax liability, but most opt not to. I used PAYE as an example because it's the most obvious and measurable group of people who could opt out of it, handle their own tax affairs, and decrease their liability.
"Well, first may I remind you that you're talking to a guy who runs multiple small businesses, and who coincidentally is in the middle of preparing tax records at the moment. So you can disagree all you like, but you are objectively wrong, and I have numbers right on the desk next to confirm it."
Just because you're not optimising your tax dealings, or having worked PAYE long enough (or ever?) to be able to see the benefits does not make me objectively wrong. It makes me subjectively wrong in your view and nothing more.
Your argument about leave is irrelevant, contractors get paid more precisely because they don't have those benefits and it's recognised when bargaining for pay. It's hence invalid to try and conflate it as a benefit of tax reduction, it's not, it's a benefit of your overall compensation package- permanent staff get it as part of their package, contractors get a higher wage to account for the fact that they do take these costs on themselves, rather than as a cost to the company employing them. If you're only getting contract rates the same as permanent employees get paid, then you're doing it wrong.
Your comments about fuel are missing the point, the point is that a PAYE employ can pretty much never claim the commute to/from work as a business expense, but the self-employed can. You claim things as tax deductible so that your resultant income is lower, and hence your taxable pay is lower. PAYE employees get taxed before any costs of doing work, such as the commute, so don't get that benefit. You have the flexibility to claim many things are cost of work that PAYE employees don't - you have the freedom to claim everything from petrol to clothes, to your phone, to your computer and so on.
"I don't see how that is possible under the current tax system, unless you are fairly obviously in the category of disguised employee and you're just playing the game and hoping to get away without an IR35 investigation."
It's possible precisely for the reasons above- you can claim far more as a cost of doing business than a PAYE employee can and can hence lower your tax burden as a result. One contractor I know has registered his company as an IT/Holidays firm, and avoids many of the taxes on his annual holiday, because he writes it off as market research, he avoids the wrath of the tax man by ensuring he "sells" family or friends a holiday, and that's enough to ensure he gets cheap holidays by decreasing his tax burden whilst he does IT contracting most of the time.
"Except that there's a pretty good argument that this isn't a "fake" charge. It's benchmarked to the royalty they get from non-subsidiary companies using their logo and IP."
Sure but it doesn't have to be that way. Other companies that don't avoid tax do just fine without this type of structure. It's a structure that's of benefit to them only for the purpose of avoiding tax.
"And it's all done with the blessing of HMRC."
Sure, but that's why HMRC has come under a lot of attacks too, because it almost seems to be more interested in helping companies avoid tax, than it does tax collection which is what it's actually there for. HMRC employees have long realised that actually, if rather than simply sending demands for tax to be paid, they sit down and work out deals with companies, it makes their job easier because they don't have to argue the toss, and it generally means they get treated to nice meals. This is why for Vodafone the tax they pay seemed to be entirely arbitrary, than based on a reflect of what they actually owed - and genuinely owed too, from a legal perspective. HMRC is broken, and the fact it doesn't even consistently deal with corporate tax evasion, let alone avoidance is demonstration of that problem.
"As to their profits coming down, maybe people have finally realised that their coffee is atrocious?"
Amusingly, some of the people interviewed outside Costa about the situation said exactly that - they only went to Costa because of the news about Starbucks' tax dealings and found out they actually prefer the cofee anyway.
"For a start, you can only do those things if you are not considered an employee. You can't just decide to call yourself a contractor and magically opt out of the normal tax/NI system when you're still doing a regular job for an employer. People used to try and do this, but with the introduction of the IR35 rules a decade or so ago, HMRC (the tax authority in the UK) can go after people who are merely "disguised employees" to get the missing tax income back."
That only applies against the most obvious tax avoidance schemes. It does nothing against the various offshoring schemes, and there are still plenty of other deductables you would not, and could not normally claim via PAYE. There are also things you can claim that most people do not (for example, employees can claim back cleaning costs of uniform, but few do). The fact is even with IR35 there are many many methods of reducing your tax liability this way and this is exactly how it works for companies like Google - if they want to maximise tax avoidance they have to keep chasing new schemes as old ones get declared illegal.
"Moreover, for those of us who really are running our own businesses rather than being someone else's employee, anything we save through not making the same payments as a typical full-time employee is usually far outweighed by what we lose because no-one pays us for time off, we have to provide our own equipment and training, we're responsible for paying all the basic bills like heating/lighting/phone/Internet, and so on."
I completely disagree that it's far outweighed, some of the things you mention can themselves be written off against reduced revenue. You can for example claim fuel costs as a cost of doing business to reduce liability there, which a PAYE employee simply cannot.
"But mysteriously saving a fortune in tax isn't a good reason to go down this path, and if that's the only reason someone is doing it then they're going to be sadly disappointed."
I think this is a fair point for what it's worth, for most people the effort simply isn't worth it, but this doesn't change my original response at all to the GP - that in fact his assertion that most people only pay the minimum tax they have to is absolutely false.
"Contractors often do make more money than their employed counterparts, but contrary to the impression given by certain mainstream media outlets, the real financial benefits don't come from dodging a bit of NI, they come from having much more flexibility to negotiate what you're paid based on the value you actually generate for customers/clients rather than being stuck with a market value salary where your employer keeps most of the profits in return for the guaranteed wage."
I don't agree with this, having contracted myself, and having a number of good contractor friends I don't think any would disagree that a lower tax burden is part of the benefit of going down that route and part the reason you make more. What it does require is that you be motivated enough to keep track of your finances though, and again, as above, for some this just isn't worth it - they just want to go to work, come home, and get paid automatically.
There are other disadvantages to contracting that you don't mention too however, you generally reach a point in your career and start contracting, but you'll often only ever contract on the career point you left at (albeit for better compensation). If you reach lead developer state, and start contracting out, you'll be less likely to ever get technical architect, or technical director contracts. This is why I stopped, because I can actually make more money by pursuing my career to higher levels in the long run, and maybe then contract out at those higher levels which allow me to command higher contract rates. So a contracting developer may be getting paid as much as a permanent lead developer, but they will never be paid as much as a permanent technical architect for example.
"As a final data point, just to put the "contractors outside PAYE are just dodging t
What does the ease of it matter? It's not easy for companies to dodge tax either, but some choose to do so, others don't. I'm not sure what the relevance of your point is here - the fact remains that most people pay more tax than they strictly legally have to.
"Besides, what big companies are doing with tax isn't avoiding paying income tax on wages. It's corporation tax, which is very different."
Well it's very different because corporations are very different, but revenue is the closest thing companies have to individuals receiving income, and corporation tax is the closest thing on revenue to income tax on an individuals income.
But then, it wasn't mean that made the comparison between corporations and individuals was it? I was merely responding to someone that already had and answering their question.
"If you set up multi-national corporations you have to pick where you'll do business, and for an internet company that can do business almost anywhere, why would you deliberately pick a high tax region over a low tax one, with all else being the same? Do you like funding wars?"
But that's not what we're talking about, corporation tax in the UK is expected to be paid on revenue after all other deductions, the problem is that companies are creating fake deductions to ensure there is nothing left for corporation tax to be paid on, in Starbucks' case for example, they make up a fake intercompany "royalty" charge to a low tax area so that they shift off all remaining revenue to other low tax areas before corporation tax is paid on it. The point is it doesn't matter where they're headquartered at all, that's irrelevant, the point is that wherever they make money they should be paying the applicable taxes. Revenues earned in the UK should pay UK corporation tax, where they're basing headquarters only applies to non-revenue based taxes. I don't have a problem with them headquartering somewhere to pay the lowest non-revenue associated taxes such as say, land tax, but what I do have a problem with is them not paying revenue based taxes in the country they earn that revenue, that's the problem here - they want all the benefits of that country in terms of profit making (such as a good infrastructure, educated workforce and so forth) but they don't want to pay any of the taxes that allow that to exist in the first place. That makes them a parasite, and that's why people don't like it - because they're making those profits off the hard work of everyone else and contributing little or nothing back to society.
Thankfully, people like you that defend this sort of action are a minority in the UK, as since these came up as an issue, Costa Coffee, a UK competitor to Starbucks that pays all the taxes it's intended they owe has seen it's profits soar, whilst Starbucks has seen a decline. Even if HMRC and government wont come down harder on it, then at least consumer action is having at least some effect.
I live and work in the UK, and I take my pay through PAYE which means my income tax is automatically deducted. Most employees in the UK get paid this way.
I, and many others have the option of being paid outside the PAYE system so that we can manage our own taxes, this would allow us to take advantage of many tax evasions schemes available, or even simply do it ourselves by paying ourselves the minimum non-taxable wage and paying the rest out in a manner that doesn't attract things like national insurance.
Some people do do this, but most don't.
So can we now finally kill this stupid "How many people reading this intentionally pay more tax than they are strictly required to?" meme? Because certainly in the UK, the answer is "most people".
If that were true then Australia would be in breach of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12.2 which states:
"Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."
Any nation officially declaring one of their own citizens persona non grata would be in deep shit over this. Note however that this is not the same as extraditing someone though, they could certainly extradite him to the US if they have an extradition treaty that allows it and if all pre-requisites - for example, any requirement for what he's accused of to be a crime in Australia had been fulfilled.
Apologies if you were using persona non grata in a casual sense, rather than in it's official diplomatic meaning in which case the blurb above about the UDHR is irrelevant.
It's not quite as straightforward as that though. If Australia declares him a diplomat then Sweden's option if they refuse to recognise immunity is to declare him persona non grata and allow him to be recalled to Australia.
So whilst they can't retroactively apply it in the UK, they can go through formal process in Sweden instead, so that when the UK ships him to Sweden, Sweden's choice is either to accept diplomatic immunity for him as a valid diplomat, or choose not to recognise it and hence declare him persona non grata and send him home.
This is really the key here, it effectively means that the UK could potentially arrest and punish him, but he's broken no law in the UK, however if they ship him somewhere else where he has broken law then the standard diplomatic process will come in to play.
This doesn't mean of course that the plan is foolproof, Sweden might simply choose to defy diplomatic convention and arrest him regardless without either accepting immunity or declaring him persona non grata, but this will have to be carefully calculated by the Swedish government, because for example if a plane carrying a Swedish MP or similar has to land in an emergency in say, Iran, then Sweden is no longer positioned to stop the Iranians entering the plane and dragging that MP off for arbitrary arrest and interrogation.
This might not sound like a big deal because Sweden has few enemies that would see reason to do this, but consider then that on defying this convention the Swedish have to go through the exact same process if they were to deport him to the US and then it's upto America to go through the same thing. Would Hilary Clinton really feel safe next time she visits or goes near North Korea given that she would then have absolutely no diplomatic protection on her side for example?
The problem is it's such a complicated issue and with so little precedent that speculation is largely meaningless, but the actions of nations in such a matter could have far reaching consequences for diplomats the world over. As such I suspect both Sweden and the US would be forced to take a step back and ask "Is this man really worth pulling the rug out from under all diplomatic precedent and protections over?"
So this move certainly doesn't guarantee Assange's safety, but it certainly provides him with an extra layer of pretty formidable protection if he were to gain a senate seat.
There's even a question of whether under such circumstances, the UK would want to risk Sweden playing that game with precedent for diplomatic relations given that one of the things that allows the UK to punch above it's weight on the international stage is it's extremely strong dependence on diplomatic missions across the globe. As such the UK might even decide to honour immunity regardless of the situation simply to avoid the issue altogether.
"Clearly, Apple's 30% cut on apps is reasonable given what app delivery would cost in setup/bandwidth/marketing/... & how it has grown the iOS app pie for everyone participating in it."
Oh don't be ridiculous. If you think bandwidth and marketing is anything near 30% of the cost of production of software then you clearly have absolutely zero understanding of the industry. You're just acting as an Apple apologist and if you think there's any sanity in a company spending 30% of it's software project's revenue on marketing/distribution then you have an insanely distorted view of the process.
"Apple is demanding 30% on in-app purchases so that applications as bought in the appstore do not become hollowed out placeholders where the main functions are in-app purchases that Apple get's no part of. No solution to this problem has been proposed by any of those complaining about it. Apple's ban on enterprise appstores is more open to criticism but not the 30% on in-app purchases."
That's not the point, the point is that 30% is way too much. If anything 30% will make companies more inclined to make apps hollow placeholders because they have to charge for more components to turn a worthwile profit.
You could equally argue that if anything it's the app creators that have helped drive iOS device sales growth, so Apple should be paying the creators a portion of the massive profits from device sales if anything as they have helped drive that.
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That's upto the courts to figure out, just as we don't have a fixed definition for "beyond reasonable doubt" when determining whether someone should be found guilty it has to be based on the weight of the evidence presented in the case - it's subjective.
Well the point is that there will have been many panzer divisions, if they capture the pidgeon 100 miles from where it was released, then how do they know which panzer division is working well based on the message? What if they get it wrong and reinforce a panzer division that is instead struggling and just end up throwing a load of extra panzers to the slaughter?
Unless there's something particularly specific in the message (like coordinates that the GGP implied should be contained) then it's still a tough thing to track down, particularly in a battlefield as dynamic as Northern France a short time after D-Day!
I've found it hit and miss really, Amazon UK's CEO was a useless waste of time, he just fobbed me back off to customer services who were the failure of a department that pushed me to contact the CEO in the first place.
In contrast, when I had to contact the CEO of BT because customer services had refused to accept that they had got things wrong and tried to charge me £120 for an engineer visit for a line to be activated even though it was live and didn't need an engineer visit the CEO replied on a Saturday afternoon within an hour from his Blackberry and passed my issue over to someone who was able to get the problem sorted on a Sunday. I was honestly not expecting to hear anything at all until mid-week, so kudos to him, for all BT's faults, the CEO obviously does actually care about customer's complaints and issues.
So ultimately it depends on the company I guess, Amazon just really don't give a toss about bad press, they're happy to fuck up, break the law, whatever, and just keep on rolling like nothing has happened. I eventually had to resort to the courts with Amazon, and of course won, because I was indisputably in the right all along despite their failure to understand and accept that. I'd guess Amazon's recent refusal to change it's ways regarding the bad press it got regarding it's tax dodging is another example of this- they just don't care about bad press so no amount of complaining at any level will get you anywhere.
Yes, and yet, I don't see them whining about Facebook who have outright breached European data protection laws time and time again without serious punishment.
Presumably in part, because of this sort of thing:
http://falkvinge.net/2012/03/02/how-microsoft-pays-big-money-to-smear-google-audaciously/
"Need somebody with more detail about the battle on this day."
Sadly, less and less such people continue to exist, at least who can give first hand accounts. My grandfather were he alive may have been one such person as he was a Royal Marine Commando motorcycle courier on the front lines active in that region on that day.
He survived the war and had many amazing stories to tell but passed away of old age 5 years ago. Sadly most of even the mementos are lost as the two SS daggers he seized and kept from a pair of captured German officers were stolen from his house a few years before he died.
Nonetheless it's all particularly interesting.
Exactly, if the HQ in Britain knows which pidgeon is assigned where either by recognising the pidgeon, or because of some identifying mark on the message, or the pidgeon's message tube itself then it would know exactly where "here" was.
It would in fact make far more sense to do it this way, as otherwise if the Nazis caught the pidgeon then they'd know too where the message was being sent from and hence learn that their panzer tactics were working in that area and could hence double up on them.
Including the area in the message seems a particularly silly thing to do in this case, and simply saying "here" is much safer if the pidgeon is identifiable back home.
Yes, it fundamentally depends on how many. If they're talking about a large number of members including some who have merely given financial contribution to the party then that would almost certainly be construed as vexatious litigation as it would be a clear attempt to subdue the party by going after it's funding source- it's members.
If it's just going after the members who actually setup, and maintained the proxy, then you're probably right, it wouldn't be enough.
This said, the vexatious litigant list is arguably under used anyway, Andrew Crossley of ACS law for example who brought suits merely to try and worry people into paying (hence why he tried to exit the suit when it actually came to court) is a clear example of a vexatious litigant, yet for some reason he was never named so like a zombie, could potentially come back from the dead again some day.
"Remember, the default position is that you can only reclaim for expenses which have been incurred "wholly, exclusively and necessarily" in the course of running your company."
Well exactly, he runs a holiday firm, he needs to do market research for that. It's a necessity of running his business. To put it into context, this is like Starbucks offloading it's profits to The Netherlands or wherever for a "royalty" payment to avoid corporation tax. We all know it's a blatant tax dodge, but they have enough plausible deniability to claim otherwise and at that point there's little HMRC can do. If they say "Well you're not selling many holidays" it doesn't really matter- HMRC don't have the power to dictate how competent you should be at making sales and succeeding in business, only to collect tax, he can just claim his business is struggling to make sales and that it's as simple as that, which is why he mostly concentrates on the IT contracting side of the business.
Yes, the problem is that the elements of speech the US has done a better job of protecting are things like being able to protest next to dead soldiers graves and call them and their families "fags". It does however still legislate against many types of speech which is pretty much the same as in Europe. See sections 4 and 5 for a decent overview:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_United_States
I'm not really convinced that the US is any better off for protecting the speech it does protect that some individual European nations do not. Allowing everyone from the KKK, to the Phelps, to Neo Nazis to say what they want doesn't strike me as having improved the richness of discourse in the US. If anything US political discourse at least seems to be getting ever more populist, and ever more irrational.
The UK does however also have a list of vexatious litigants:
http://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/vexatious-litigants
These are people who can no longer bring civil suits because they have taken the piss too much. If the BPI files too many frivolous lawsuits it's staff (likely it's lawyers) will find themselves no longer able to practice in civil suits because they will become named on this list.
"You're defending ideas from an era of musket loaders. The 2nd amendment does not at all take into consideration the type of weapons people can get their hands on today."
It's an interesting fallacy the second amendment apologists continue bring up. They seem oblivious to the fact that it doesn't specify a particular type of arms people should have the right to bear, but that just about everyone even avid defenders of gun ownership would normally agree that, for example, you don't have the right to own a nuclear tipped ICBM. Where you then draw the line depends, are you allowed a cruise missile? are you allowed an anti-tank launcher? are you allowed a fully automatic rifle with grenade launcher attachment?, just a fully automatic rifle? and so on. Fundmentally, even gun nuts tend to draw the line somewhere down that path, but they seem to miss the fact that where, is rather arbitrary and subjective.
Like you say, the law would've kind of worked in an era of muskets, but weapons technology gets more advanced, how advanced do gun nuts intend to let it get before they draw the line? The right to bear personal suitcase nukes? What if you're a muslim immigrant from downtown Kandahar with a background of the US military having accidently killed your wife whilst also harbouring extremist and anti-Western views, is it okay that he still carries his proposed suitcase nuke into the centre of times square? Or does some measure of arbitrary control suddenly enter the gun nuts mind?
I don't think they've really thought through their position and the irrationality and hypocrisy of it, or really even thought at all for that matter.
"Too bad Bruce doesn't support your choice to not give up yours. He would benevolently take away everybody's right to self defense by the bearing of arms and not "miss it." Lovely..."
He's not talking about taking anyone's right to self defence, just to own a gun, something which is not necessary for self defence.
When I was in Canada last, speaking to a cop friend there she asked how on earth our police survive by not carrying guns. She asked, what happens when someone comes at them with a knife?
I answer that it's quite simple, they spray CS spray in the guy's face, grab the knife with their slash proof gloves, and them smack the fucker round the back of the head with their night stick.
Stop being a bunch of pussies pretending you need firearms to protect yourself.
"You can try to control them by legislation, but you inevitably end up just making it more difficult for honest citizens to have them."
Yes, and that's exactly the point. The guy who carried out this massacre, and just about every other massacre in the US was an honest citizen until the event.
"Our experience has shown that such "experiments" do little, if anything, to prevent criminals and lunatics from having guns, but we know that they are emboldened by the prospect that others are less likely to have guns. Case in point: this tragedy happened in a so-called "gun-free zone."
This is what one would normally call a lie. In the UK gun crime has drastically decreased as a result of our gun control laws, knife crime has increased in it's place, but nowhere near enough to make up for the drop in gun crime, giving us a large net drop in crimes involving weapons. I'm not sure what your case in point is supposed to mean? The only case in point is that a guy with a legitimately owned weapon yet again murdered a bunch of innocent people. A weapon that he quite likely would not have been able to acquire with sensible gun laws.
Your next paragraph is again just full of completely made up lies and completely counter to the truth, so I wont even waste my time with that one, and for what it's worth I was in the TA (the UK's reserve force) so yes, I know how to handle a gun, but this doesn't change the fact that accidents do happen, and stupidity trumps everything in your argument:
http://jonathanturley.org/2008/03/25/man-shoots-and-kills-wife-while-using-gun-to-drill-holes/
"This discussion won't change anything about today's sad tragedy, but how might this situation have turned out differently if the teachers had been allowed to opt to train with a firearm (if they so chose) and allowed to keep a secure firearm on their person."
Hahahaha, hahahahaha. Yeah, great, then multiply this across every school in the US, and when little Timmy finds teachers gun and accidently blows little Sarah away you can pretend it's because little Timmy wasn't trained, and all kids should be trained in fire arms from birth. You can also pretend that a teacher will trivially be able to draw faster than their attacker, and have time for better training (you know, rather than simply learning to teach better- what they're there for), and when it comes to, actually pull the trigger. Because, you know, even large proportions of trained soldiers struggle to find the courage to shoot at the enemy to make the kill:
http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/THE-SCIENCE-OF-CREATING-KILLERS-Human-2514123.php
As pointed out in the article, you can train them out of this, you can train them to be killers. Because that's exactly what you want, you want primary school teachers trained to be killers and armed.
Well done, you just offered a way of drastically increasing the number of psycopaths in America. Feel free to completely rethink your position, try again, and offer a suggestion a bit more useful next time.
To be fair, O'Dwyer largely only has himself to blame though. In accepting the deal with the US to pay them $20,000 and promise not to break any US laws again (which is fucking sick, since when did the US get to hold British citizens to US legal standards?) he ended the situation early, but didn't let enough pressure build on Theresa May to go the same route.
I think it's almost a certainty that O'Dwyer's extradition would also have been blocked eventually once appeals etc. were exhausted and enough political pressure exerted, but he didn't let it reach that point. I sympathise with why he didn't, but I think the deal he accepted was pretty fucking stupid, as he signed an agreement that means he can now be extradited to the US for breaking a US law in the UK that is not a crime here.
Potentially, if he was jaywalking in the UK (not an actual crime in the UK) that could now give the US reason to extradite him again. Whether they'd actually do that I guess depends on what he does with his life now, but there strikes me as something very wrong with the deal he accepted.
Still, I can sympathise with why he accepted it- to get it all over and done with, but I'm intrigued to see if it turns round and bites him sometime in the future, I wouldn't want that deal hanging over my head as it strikes me as almost as bad as the extradition itself hanging over you.
Quite possibly no, he didn't. The quote from the CPS:
"The potential difficulties in bringing a case in England and Wales now should not be underestimated, not least the passage of time, the logistics of transferring sensitive evidence prepared for a court in the US to London for trial, the participation of US government witnesses in the trial and the need fully to comply with the duties of disclosure imposed on the CPS.
The prospects of a conviction against Mr McKinnon which reflects the full extent of his alleged criminality are not high."
Which basically says that whilst the US claimed all those things, there was basically no chance of the US being able to prove any of it to be actually true to the standards required in a British court.
That doesn't really instill confidence, if he'd done so much damage you'd have thought they'd be able to at least bring some witnesses, and some evidence over to prove at least some degree of criminality. The fact they can't even prove the slightest bit of it to gain at least some kind of conviction really talks for itself.
As is normal in cases like this the prosecution throws everything they can at the defendant to see what will stick. In this case the CPS (the UK's prosecution) judged that it's very likely that absolutely none of it will actually stick.
The only thing that would even be a grey area is the holiday thing (though it sounds like you're implying the rest is? of course it's not- everything else I suggested is accepted by HMRC as genuine costs of doing business), but even that's perfectly legal (though I agree immoral) because he is actually selling holidays.
It sounds, if anything, that you largely agree with the original point I was making here though if you personally don't make these deductions - that many of us could decrease our tax bill and do so legally, but to most of us it's immoral, and so we stick to only legitimate claims. But this is exactly the sort of thing we're talking about from Amazon, Google, Starbucks et. al. the stuff they do is technically legal, like the holiays dodge, but very much immoral by most people's standards.
My point wasn't that those who handle their own tax affairs are necessarily tax dodgers which, I believe is the view you felt I was pushing given your original post, but simply that just about anyone in the UK can decrease their tax liability, but most opt not to. I used PAYE as an example because it's the most obvious and measurable group of people who could opt out of it, handle their own tax affairs, and decrease their liability.
"Well, first may I remind you that you're talking to a guy who runs multiple small businesses, and who coincidentally is in the middle of preparing tax records at the moment. So you can disagree all you like, but you are objectively wrong, and I have numbers right on the desk next to confirm it."
Just because you're not optimising your tax dealings, or having worked PAYE long enough (or ever?) to be able to see the benefits does not make me objectively wrong. It makes me subjectively wrong in your view and nothing more.
Your argument about leave is irrelevant, contractors get paid more precisely because they don't have those benefits and it's recognised when bargaining for pay. It's hence invalid to try and conflate it as a benefit of tax reduction, it's not, it's a benefit of your overall compensation package- permanent staff get it as part of their package, contractors get a higher wage to account for the fact that they do take these costs on themselves, rather than as a cost to the company employing them. If you're only getting contract rates the same as permanent employees get paid, then you're doing it wrong.
Your comments about fuel are missing the point, the point is that a PAYE employ can pretty much never claim the commute to/from work as a business expense, but the self-employed can. You claim things as tax deductible so that your resultant income is lower, and hence your taxable pay is lower. PAYE employees get taxed before any costs of doing work, such as the commute, so don't get that benefit. You have the flexibility to claim many things are cost of work that PAYE employees don't - you have the freedom to claim everything from petrol to clothes, to your phone, to your computer and so on.
"I don't see how that is possible under the current tax system, unless you are fairly obviously in the category of disguised employee and you're just playing the game and hoping to get away without an IR35 investigation."
It's possible precisely for the reasons above- you can claim far more as a cost of doing business than a PAYE employee can and can hence lower your tax burden as a result. One contractor I know has registered his company as an IT/Holidays firm, and avoids many of the taxes on his annual holiday, because he writes it off as market research, he avoids the wrath of the tax man by ensuring he "sells" family or friends a holiday, and that's enough to ensure he gets cheap holidays by decreasing his tax burden whilst he does IT contracting most of the time.
"Except that there's a pretty good argument that this isn't a "fake" charge. It's benchmarked to the royalty they get from non-subsidiary companies using their logo and IP."
Sure but it doesn't have to be that way. Other companies that don't avoid tax do just fine without this type of structure. It's a structure that's of benefit to them only for the purpose of avoiding tax.
"And it's all done with the blessing of HMRC."
Sure, but that's why HMRC has come under a lot of attacks too, because it almost seems to be more interested in helping companies avoid tax, than it does tax collection which is what it's actually there for. HMRC employees have long realised that actually, if rather than simply sending demands for tax to be paid, they sit down and work out deals with companies, it makes their job easier because they don't have to argue the toss, and it generally means they get treated to nice meals. This is why for Vodafone the tax they pay seemed to be entirely arbitrary, than based on a reflect of what they actually owed - and genuinely owed too, from a legal perspective. HMRC is broken, and the fact it doesn't even consistently deal with corporate tax evasion, let alone avoidance is demonstration of that problem.
"As to their profits coming down, maybe people have finally realised that their coffee is atrocious?"
Amusingly, some of the people interviewed outside Costa about the situation said exactly that - they only went to Costa because of the news about Starbucks' tax dealings and found out they actually prefer the cofee anyway.
"For a start, you can only do those things if you are not considered an employee. You can't just decide to call yourself a contractor and magically opt out of the normal tax/NI system when you're still doing a regular job for an employer. People used to try and do this, but with the introduction of the IR35 rules a decade or so ago, HMRC (the tax authority in the UK) can go after people who are merely "disguised employees" to get the missing tax income back."
That only applies against the most obvious tax avoidance schemes. It does nothing against the various offshoring schemes, and there are still plenty of other deductables you would not, and could not normally claim via PAYE. There are also things you can claim that most people do not (for example, employees can claim back cleaning costs of uniform, but few do). The fact is even with IR35 there are many many methods of reducing your tax liability this way and this is exactly how it works for companies like Google - if they want to maximise tax avoidance they have to keep chasing new schemes as old ones get declared illegal.
"Moreover, for those of us who really are running our own businesses rather than being someone else's employee, anything we save through not making the same payments as a typical full-time employee is usually far outweighed by what we lose because no-one pays us for time off, we have to provide our own equipment and training, we're responsible for paying all the basic bills like heating/lighting/phone/Internet, and so on."
I completely disagree that it's far outweighed, some of the things you mention can themselves be written off against reduced revenue. You can for example claim fuel costs as a cost of doing business to reduce liability there, which a PAYE employee simply cannot.
"But mysteriously saving a fortune in tax isn't a good reason to go down this path, and if that's the only reason someone is doing it then they're going to be sadly disappointed."
I think this is a fair point for what it's worth, for most people the effort simply isn't worth it, but this doesn't change my original response at all to the GP - that in fact his assertion that most people only pay the minimum tax they have to is absolutely false.
"Contractors often do make more money than their employed counterparts, but contrary to the impression given by certain mainstream media outlets, the real financial benefits don't come from dodging a bit of NI, they come from having much more flexibility to negotiate what you're paid based on the value you actually generate for customers/clients rather than being stuck with a market value salary where your employer keeps most of the profits in return for the guaranteed wage."
I don't agree with this, having contracted myself, and having a number of good contractor friends I don't think any would disagree that a lower tax burden is part of the benefit of going down that route and part the reason you make more. What it does require is that you be motivated enough to keep track of your finances though, and again, as above, for some this just isn't worth it - they just want to go to work, come home, and get paid automatically.
There are other disadvantages to contracting that you don't mention too however, you generally reach a point in your career and start contracting, but you'll often only ever contract on the career point you left at (albeit for better compensation). If you reach lead developer state, and start contracting out, you'll be less likely to ever get technical architect, or technical director contracts. This is why I stopped, because I can actually make more money by pursuing my career to higher levels in the long run, and maybe then contract out at those higher levels which allow me to command higher contract rates. So a contracting developer may be getting paid as much as a permanent lead developer, but they will never be paid as much as a permanent technical architect for example.
"As a final data point, just to put the "contractors outside PAYE are just dodging t
"I think you massively over-estimate the ease of"
What does the ease of it matter? It's not easy for companies to dodge tax either, but some choose to do so, others don't. I'm not sure what the relevance of your point is here - the fact remains that most people pay more tax than they strictly legally have to.
"Besides, what big companies are doing with tax isn't avoiding paying income tax on wages. It's corporation tax, which is very different."
Well it's very different because corporations are very different, but revenue is the closest thing companies have to individuals receiving income, and corporation tax is the closest thing on revenue to income tax on an individuals income.
But then, it wasn't mean that made the comparison between corporations and individuals was it? I was merely responding to someone that already had and answering their question.
"If you set up multi-national corporations you have to pick where you'll do business, and for an internet company that can do business almost anywhere, why would you deliberately pick a high tax region over a low tax one, with all else being the same? Do you like funding wars?"
But that's not what we're talking about, corporation tax in the UK is expected to be paid on revenue after all other deductions, the problem is that companies are creating fake deductions to ensure there is nothing left for corporation tax to be paid on, in Starbucks' case for example, they make up a fake intercompany "royalty" charge to a low tax area so that they shift off all remaining revenue to other low tax areas before corporation tax is paid on it. The point is it doesn't matter where they're headquartered at all, that's irrelevant, the point is that wherever they make money they should be paying the applicable taxes. Revenues earned in the UK should pay UK corporation tax, where they're basing headquarters only applies to non-revenue based taxes. I don't have a problem with them headquartering somewhere to pay the lowest non-revenue associated taxes such as say, land tax, but what I do have a problem with is them not paying revenue based taxes in the country they earn that revenue, that's the problem here - they want all the benefits of that country in terms of profit making (such as a good infrastructure, educated workforce and so forth) but they don't want to pay any of the taxes that allow that to exist in the first place. That makes them a parasite, and that's why people don't like it - because they're making those profits off the hard work of everyone else and contributing little or nothing back to society.
Thankfully, people like you that defend this sort of action are a minority in the UK, as since these came up as an issue, Costa Coffee, a UK competitor to Starbucks that pays all the taxes it's intended they owe has seen it's profits soar, whilst Starbucks has seen a decline. Even if HMRC and government wont come down harder on it, then at least consumer action is having at least some effect.
I do actually. As do most of the UK's population.
I live and work in the UK, and I take my pay through PAYE which means my income tax is automatically deducted. Most employees in the UK get paid this way.
I, and many others have the option of being paid outside the PAYE system so that we can manage our own taxes, this would allow us to take advantage of many tax evasions schemes available, or even simply do it ourselves by paying ourselves the minimum non-taxable wage and paying the rest out in a manner that doesn't attract things like national insurance.
Some people do do this, but most don't.
So can we now finally kill this stupid "How many people reading this intentionally pay more tax than they are strictly required to?" meme? Because certainly in the UK, the answer is "most people".
If that were true then Australia would be in breach of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 12.2 which states:
"Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."
Any nation officially declaring one of their own citizens persona non grata would be in deep shit over this. Note however that this is not the same as extraditing someone though, they could certainly extradite him to the US if they have an extradition treaty that allows it and if all pre-requisites - for example, any requirement for what he's accused of to be a crime in Australia had been fulfilled.
Apologies if you were using persona non grata in a casual sense, rather than in it's official diplomatic meaning in which case the blurb above about the UDHR is irrelevant.
It's not quite as straightforward as that though. If Australia declares him a diplomat then Sweden's option if they refuse to recognise immunity is to declare him persona non grata and allow him to be recalled to Australia.
So whilst they can't retroactively apply it in the UK, they can go through formal process in Sweden instead, so that when the UK ships him to Sweden, Sweden's choice is either to accept diplomatic immunity for him as a valid diplomat, or choose not to recognise it and hence declare him persona non grata and send him home.
This is really the key here, it effectively means that the UK could potentially arrest and punish him, but he's broken no law in the UK, however if they ship him somewhere else where he has broken law then the standard diplomatic process will come in to play.
This doesn't mean of course that the plan is foolproof, Sweden might simply choose to defy diplomatic convention and arrest him regardless without either accepting immunity or declaring him persona non grata, but this will have to be carefully calculated by the Swedish government, because for example if a plane carrying a Swedish MP or similar has to land in an emergency in say, Iran, then Sweden is no longer positioned to stop the Iranians entering the plane and dragging that MP off for arbitrary arrest and interrogation.
This might not sound like a big deal because Sweden has few enemies that would see reason to do this, but consider then that on defying this convention the Swedish have to go through the exact same process if they were to deport him to the US and then it's upto America to go through the same thing. Would Hilary Clinton really feel safe next time she visits or goes near North Korea given that she would then have absolutely no diplomatic protection on her side for example?
The problem is it's such a complicated issue and with so little precedent that speculation is largely meaningless, but the actions of nations in such a matter could have far reaching consequences for diplomats the world over. As such I suspect both Sweden and the US would be forced to take a step back and ask "Is this man really worth pulling the rug out from under all diplomatic precedent and protections over?"
So this move certainly doesn't guarantee Assange's safety, but it certainly provides him with an extra layer of pretty formidable protection if he were to gain a senate seat.
There's even a question of whether under such circumstances, the UK would want to risk Sweden playing that game with precedent for diplomatic relations given that one of the things that allows the UK to punch above it's weight on the international stage is it's extremely strong dependence on diplomatic missions across the globe. As such the UK might even decide to honour immunity regardless of the situation simply to avoid the issue altogether.
"Clearly, Apple's 30% cut on apps is reasonable given what app delivery would cost in setup/bandwidth/marketing/... & how it has grown the iOS app pie for everyone participating in it."
Oh don't be ridiculous. If you think bandwidth and marketing is anything near 30% of the cost of production of software then you clearly have absolutely zero understanding of the industry. You're just acting as an Apple apologist and if you think there's any sanity in a company spending 30% of it's software project's revenue on marketing/distribution then you have an insanely distorted view of the process.
"Apple is demanding 30% on in-app purchases so that applications as bought in the appstore do not become hollowed out placeholders where the main functions are in-app purchases that Apple get's no part of. No solution to this problem has been proposed by any of those complaining about it. Apple's ban on enterprise appstores is more open to criticism but not the 30% on in-app purchases."
That's not the point, the point is that 30% is way too much. If anything 30% will make companies more inclined to make apps hollow placeholders because they have to charge for more components to turn a worthwile profit.
You could equally argue that if anything it's the app creators that have helped drive iOS device sales growth, so Apple should be paying the creators a portion of the massive profits from device sales if anything as they have helped drive that.
Yes, bless the Lib Dems if on nothing else at least they've been consistent on this in opposing it both in and out of government.
Anonymous cowards eat the humour out of threads as well sadly.