The problem with that sort of analysis is that it's impossible to reasonably compare a country of 320,000 people to countries of between 10million and 80million.
Iceland is smaller than many European cities. It's also worth noting that even countries that didn't have to bail anyone out are currently struggling with economic troubles (Canada, Australia, China).
It's not therefore clear that Iceland's actions relating to banking is what really saved it's economy, furthermore, as you note yourself it's going to hand away 6% of GDP every year for 6 years come 2017 - most developed countries are happy to see 2 - 3% GDP growth per year, so Iceland is effectively going to be giving away between 2x and 3x that each year for 6 years. In other words, they've largely just deferred their recession. One might argue that's a sensible thing to do as it's easier to weather recession when the rest of the world is growing, but if China doesn't pick up soon they may find that they've actually deferred it until the worst possible time rather than simply getting it over and done with when everyone else did.
As an aside, the eurozone hasn't had an 8 year recession, a recession requires two subsequent quarters of negative growth and the eurozone was only in that situation back in 2008 and 2009 when every other large western economy was. I think you're confusing recession for low growth, which is the actual problem.
So long story short, it's not really clear that Iceland hasn't done anything other than delay (and potentially prolong) it's pain. What it did was certainly "different", but was it succesful? Who knows because it'll be another 7 years before they're done with it. Deferring a problem doesn't mean it's gone away.
"Six members of the House of Lords, three former Conservative MPs and dozens of donors to UK political parties have had offshore assets."
If you live in the UK that's not in the remotest bit surprising, Lord Ashcroft one of those mentioned was exposed way back in the early 2000s, and evidence has trickled out about him ever since. There was a massive uproar because he was a non-Dom for tax reasons, and yet was allowed to be involved in politics. The public weren't happy that someone who isn't actually British was allowed to partake in British governance, and so there was a big push to make him drop that status. He did and has avoided (and possibly evaded) tax in other ways. It seems those could well now have been exposed also.
The others named aren't new names on this front either, they're all fairly well known for being as dodgy as they come on this front. There are some that are equally as dodgy but that aren't named - those ones probably just use a different firm.
In many countries, rather than being paid directly you can register as a business, whether that's as a sole trader, or some other type really depends on your country, it's laws, and it's options.
Whilst it's getting harder in some countries, such as the UK, what you were long able to do is get your employer to pay your business entity, rather than you, and then pay yourself from your company the minimum salary you can get away with that is either tax free, or low tax. The extra money paid to your business will typically then be paid to you via a mechanism such as dividends, which you will not pay standard income tax bands on, but will pay capital gains bands, which are generally lower.
So for example, in the UK, the tax bands on standard income are roughly as follows:
So if you were earning say £60k a year, you'd pay 0% on the first £10,000, 20% on the £32,000 between £10,000 and £42,000, and then 40% on the £18,000 between £42,000 and £60,000. That is:
(Note: You also pay NI tax in the UK, but I'm keeping it simple here).
Now, if you'd instead paid via your company using the aforementioned low salary + capital gains combo, the capital gains tax rates were, until Friday I believe roughly:
£0 - £11,000 = 0% tax £11,000+ = 20% tax IF you are paying 40% income tax £11,000+ = 10% tax IF you are NOT paying 40% income tax
This is because you're paying yourself a salary of £10,000 on which no income tax is owed, and then £50,000 in dividends which are owed at only the non-40% CGT rate, because your salary paid to yourself isn't in the 40% bracket, so 10% is owed on this.
Now, you do typically have other costs from doing this - you have to pay a chartered accountant for example, which narrows the gap, but these costs are typically fixed.
Again this is a very simplified example, other taxes and costs do come in to play, and countries have been cracking down on this kind of avoidance to varying degrees, but hopefully this illustrates the sort of tactic that has long been abused. Effectively it's only worth it if your salary justifies it - the problem is if you're on a lower salary (say £30k), you may find that by the time you've paid your accountant et. al. that you've not really achieved anything other than wasting an awful lot of your time filling in tax returns - it's not worth the effort unless your salary is high enough for the fixed costs and hassle to disappear into irrelevance compared to the tax saving.
Again, depending on the country you're in this may not even be possible any more (if it ever was), or the rates may be adjusted to make it not worthwhile - i.e. some countries have more progressive tax rates than the UK, and some have smaller gaps between income and CGT rates. I don't know how the numbers work out in the US to put it in the context of the GP's point.
But convictions aren't done based on absolute proof, because otherwise it'd be impossible to convict anyone ever.
If someone murders someone and their DNA is seen at the crime and they're caught on CCTV, and the murder weapon is found at their house, and they have motive, and they confessed during police interview, they could just block any requirement for absolute proof by simply claiming their DNA was planted, the CCTV was just a lookalike, the murder weapon was planted, and the confession was coerced.
In absence of evidence to back up any of their defence (i.e. if no evidence of coercion, no evidence of DNA or the weapon being planted, no evidence of a doppleganger even existing, the most likely conclusion is that they were the perpetrator and yet if they were your suggestion is that they should go free because you're effectively arguing that "I didn't do it!" is a legitimate defence against every court trial ever.
It's ultimately a balance, as you increase standards of evidence you decrease the amount of wrongful convictions, but you increase the amount of actual criminals who can get away with their crimes. If you decrease the standards you increase the amount of wrongful convictions but you also convict a lot more actual criminals. To retain a reasonable level of convictions of actual criminals you have to accept that there will be some wrongful convictions purely because of the numbers involved.
Whilst it sucks for people who are wrongfully convicted most people would argue that one extra wrongful conviction for every additional 10,000 correct convictions of people who couldn't otherwise be convicted because of an unachievably high standard of evidence is an acceptable price to pay. For some crimes, for example, sexual assault, the conviction rate is already far too low (as measured through statistical comparison of conviction rates of other crimes) because it all too often comes down to he-said she-said, which doesn't meet the existing required standard of evidence.
So what your effectively advocating is that we should prevent 10s of people being wrongfully convicted each year which is fine, but you're proposing a solution whereby orders of magnitude more actual criminals can get away with their crimes. You can't have one without the other unless you also change some other variable - like going down the route of a police state and reducing freedom to make it easier to obtain higher standards of evidence due to CCTV in everyone's house and on every street that the state has access to.
What you want to achieve is noble, but the solution you're proposing creates bigger problems than it solves. You're trading improved justice for 10s of wrongfully convicted people for loss of justice for thousands of people. That's not an improvement by any objective measure, because ability to obtain justice is the overall goal here.
I don't think you know the first thing about the Wii U, it wasn't priced in a range "poor people" could afford, and it comfortably supported 1080p in just about all of it's games.
It was never designed with the ultra-realistic graphics of the PS4/X1 in mind that's for sure, but the rendering requirements of the cartoony style graphics Nintendo typically requires are lower anyway so it could get away with being underpowered compared to those consoles.
Ultimately it was a console that had an excellent selection of 1st party titles let down by lack of 3rd party support failing to fill the long periods between releases of the excellent 1st party titles. If anything it's major shortcoming is that it was more expensive than the original Wii so wasn't quite in the impulse buy territory of pricing for many people like the Wii was.
So as a "poor person" (I must be, because I bought a Wii U) that also owns an X1 and a PS4 I can comfortably say that you have no idea what you're talking about. Nintendo made some massive mis-steps and they deservedly paid the price for that, but taking a step back and looking at the games the system has, how they play, and the quality of them? It seems hard to fault the device. It took a long time to reach a point where it has a good library of high quality games because it was so dependent on 1st party releases, but it has a decent library now and I'd argue it's a console with a games library that's well worth buying nowadays.
If you want AAA shooters and action games then sure, it's probably not for you. But if you like to mix it up a little with games that are colourful rather than depressing, fun rather than serious, and offer a fair bit of puzzling requiring you to engage your brain rather than mindless on-rails storylines and trigger pulling then it's well worth buying alongside your X1 and/or PS4 to give you that kind of variation - those platforms just don't offer the sort of game, the look and feel, and style of challenge that the Wii U does, so it complements well. As the saying goes, variety is the spice of life.
There are other great non-Mario games on the platform too. Captain Toad Treasure Tracker, Pikmin 3, and Lego City Undercover for example were all excellent AAA titles of a quality that the other consoles sorely lack.
Don't get me wrong, I have my X1 and PS4 as well, and I play the X1 by far the most out of the three, but if it weren't for the WiiU, there'd have been some absolutely fantastic titles that would have just never seen the light of day and there'd be a hole the size of hundreds of hours of incredibly enjoyable gaming missing from my life over the last few years without it.
Web blocking certainly is legal under UK law, that doesn't make it right of course, but it's certainly legal because we have no inherent legal right in the UK to wholly uncensored internet access.
I'd like to think though that this guy has a reasonable chance of going free (though it might not happen until appeal, lower courts are generally inept on technical issues - see the Doncaster airport bomb threat tweet case). The OiNK owner got away with it and he was running an actual piracy site rather than a simply list of proxys, so mostly I suspect this is the police abusing their power to try and make a point that even if you do nothing wrong they can still fuck up their life. That's obviously unacceptable and if it is the case the police will need to be heavily reprimanded for it, and the people pushing for prosecution fired.
I wont hold my breath though, these guys are part of the City of London police and it doesn't get much more corrupt than that bunch of corporate puppets. Those guys are basically a government mandated, publicly funded, corporate run hit squad and are the complete anti-thesis of the concept of policing by consent that has been at the core of British policing since it's very inception. PIPCUs entire modus operandi is bullying and intimidation, it's what they do and how they operate.
It's just a shame more people don't stand up to them - they've only been able to claim they're successful because too many companies have done as PIPCU has asked (i.e. pulled advertising from sites PIPCU doesn't like) rather than tell them to go fuck themselves. The sooner PIPCU's tactics start failing, the sooner they'll get their funding pulled and the sooner this embarrassment to British policing can be swept into the bowels of the history books and forgotten about.
It sounds like you don't because you clearly lack not the slightest clue about what modern online marketing campaigns look like.
You probably also think "This person got in her car, and you'll never guess what happened next!" clickbait isn't a marketing tactic either and is a straight up honest insightful headline too right?
Even without that his assertion that without open borders Europe was free from terrorism is incredibly laughable. There has actually been far less terrorism in Europe since open borders, though that's frankly because borders open or not have had no impact on reducing terrorism and other factors (like the end of the cold war) have had a far bigger impact. 9/11 in itself made the business of terrorism a whole lot harder - no one wants to hijack an airliner now simply to make a political statement since the stakes changed for passengers from sit quietly and you'll eventually be let go, to sit quietly and we'll fly you into a building - passengers wont just sit there and not rise up against the hijackers now when they know that everyone dying is a highly likely outcome.
If he really believes that between WW2 and the late 90s there were no major terrorist attacks in Europe then his obviously far too ignorant to be even engaging in such a discussion. Even outside of the IRA there was Black September (Munich), there was Spain being hit by ETA, and folks like Carlos the Jackal, along with many Mafia terrorism incidents in Italy and countless smaller separatist groups carrying out fairly major attacks. You have to have largely lived under a rock to not know this as so much of it has reached common conciousness such as the iconic scenes of the SAS at the Iranian Embassy Siege in London, or the film, Munich, or any countless number of other TV shows, films, or documentaries about these sorts of incidents.
But I don't believe he's that ignorant, frankly he's doing exactly what everyone here complains about politicians doing - he's using the aftermath of a terrorist attack to use the politics of fear to push a political agenda that's entirely irrelevant to to the attack (namely, he wants dismemberment of the EU and thinks a terrorist attack is a good opportunity to push that agenda). The politics of fear has as much legitimacy in pushing this kind of agenda as it does being used by governments to push for more mass surveillance etc.
Even if the IRA did phone in all the time, which as you rightly point out, they most definitely didn't, I still struggle to see how that makes it not terrorism anyway, or acceptable terrorism, or however else he wishes to justify it. Hundreds still died to people carrying out attacks often against civilian targets to push a political and religious agenda in the exact same way today's attackers presumably (presumably because I'm assuming they're with ISIS or at least pushing their agenda) have.
It's hard to quietly arrest someone that's running around a major European capital city with an AK-47.
No matter how hard you might try, someone's going to see and film the guys in body armour with assault rifles running around after him in countries where armed police are a rare sight.
I'm sure they were and I'm sure a lot of people would be, but if Britain has no legal right to use force to give them it then why is it Britain's job anymore than anyone elses, particularly theirs, to fight for it?
As usual Britain would be in a lose-lose situation, bitched at if we don't, and bitched at if we do, so taking the option that minimises casualties, and prevents deterioration of international stability is the most sane choice.
If people are concerned about the people's right to democracy and think a military solution is the answer then maybe they could write to their own governments to demand they intervene militarily? We've spilt more than our fair share of blood over the years doing exact that and the people of Hong Kong have everything they need to maintain their own democracy - we've given them a far better head start than most nations lacking it have had, both those that were British colonies and those that were not.
I'm not sure what's more disturbing, the fact that you're denying posting what is a blatant slashvertisement (please read what you've posted, it reads exactly like an advertisement and is pointless as a question because it's so entirely subjective) or that you're running Slashdot but aren't aware of the history it's suffered under previous owners of it's user being piss fed up of owning companies doing nothing but posting controversial articles to create flame wars because they stir page hits.
It doesn't really matter what the comments say when the headline is clearly designed to raise awareness of the fact Apple is releasing a new phone and iPad and asks if you're excited.
A non slashvertisment headline asking the same thing would've run somewhere more along the lines of a simple "Has Apple lost it's charm?".
Even if we had a strong enough Royal Navy to hold off the entire Chinese mainland what good would it have done us? We'd have been a global pariah for illegally annexing foreign sovereign territory. Our reputation was hammered enough for simply invading and occupying Iraq, that wasn't even an annexation. What good would annexing part of China's territory and the inevitable hundreds of thousands of deaths and billions in costs do?
Democracy is all well and good, but sometimes if that's what people want they have to fight for it themselves. Little use us doing it for them if it destroys us economically, militarily, and politically. The days of British imperialism are dead, it doesn't hurt, because it's a good thing - the world has moved on. We still have plenty of territory that actually belongs to us by way of the countless patches of British Overseas Territory that exist without us trying to seize by force and claim and administer that which doesn't.
Well I'm glad to see the new owners have decided to pursue slashvertisements as questions as if we'll somehow be outwitted by that kind of move and not notice a blatant slashvertisement when we see one.
No BizWank or whatever you're called now, we're not fooled. A slashvertisement is a slashvertisment, no matter how you try sand dress it up. Actual news, not adverts pretending to be news please.
The West wont touch NK because of China, China doesn't want to deal with NK because it doesn't want to deal with millions of desperate migrants out of NK, nor does it want a likely Western oriented nation (United Korea) directly on it's doorstep.
The calculus will change if and when North Korea becomes a bigger problem to have on your doorstep than a Western friendly nation would and the cost of refugees ends up being lower than the cost of a madman. China doesn't want to have to occupy North Korea because it's already got enough restive regions on it's plate to deal with such as Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang province etc. without having to add yet another one. Contrary to China's big strong image it's a fragile divided nation only one arab-spring type event away from seeing a pandemic of breakaway states. It doesn't need another one of those on it's plate if it can help it.
Kim exists as he does because he's convenient to the Chinese now - having a buffer nation to retain extremely poor North Koreans so that you don't have to deal with them yourself, and to separate you physically from a Western facing nation like South Korea is extremely convenient for China. As soon as he becomes much more inconvenient he and his state will cease to exist as they do now - if Kim keeps people poor the number of people trying to escape to China will only increase and so China will suffer the refugee influx regardless. If he keeps acting in a manner that forces a greater Western military buildup in the seas around the area then the relevance of that buffer zone between them and the West will start to erode also.
Kim can push, but only so far, and if he crosses a line he'll no longer be useful.
That sounds like an awfully circular argument - no one can use anonymity to try and pursue their political views because it might cause anonymity to be taken away. If people can't use anonymity for things like pursuing political views then what's the point in it anyway? Something that's there, but can't be used, is about as useful as something just not being there in the first place.
And yet the UK persists with First Past the Post that leaves more British citizens disenfranchised than they are when they place their European Parliament vote which is based on a form of proportional representation.
I fail to see how localism is served by EU exit when the EU grants more localised regions actual political representation than most citizens receive when they're not represented under FPTP.
If anything from what I can see see EU exit only serves one group of people - those who have already ensured that the British parliament is undemocratic often obtaining 100% of power with little more than 30% of the national vote. If anything the EU vote is about centralisation of power, making sure Westminster becomes an unchallenged bastion of power of which typically almost two thirds of the country have absolutely no say in.
It shouldn't be surprising that many of the same people supporting EU exit are the same people who are consistently against a more democratic UK having repeatedly blocked moves to a more proportional or fairer form of representation, who block reform of the Lords to make it democratic, who support single vested interest monopolisation of important sectors such as media and news, and who wholeheartedly defend political moves towards police state. They don't want more power for us, they want more power for them, they hate the EU because it's a major barrier in preventing the authoritarianism they so desire, because that's precisely what the EU (the then EC) was designed to do in the wake of World War II. When people like Farage say they'll quit and don't because they simply can't cope with loss of power one would think the sort of authorianism such Brexiters desire is obvious, but apparently some are still in absolutely love with the idea of it and are willing to support the March towards it.
The out argument would make sense if it was backed by a promise for healthy democracy in the UK, but it isn't, because it's about the exact opposite of that.
I'm just fucking glad I have my exit strategy sorted by way of a wife that has dual citizenship. I just hope everyone that's left behind is willing to live with what they've voted for and when the boomers succeed in kicking out everyone not British I hope they'll be happy cleaning out their own bed pans, because there'll be no one else left to do it for them.
"As for the retaliation, we won't know if that would be the case until the UK actually left the EU. Kind of like the status of a certain cat in a box."
We wont know with absolute certainty, but it'd be naive to bet on anything else.
If the UK leaves the EU the EU will be desperate to stop itself breaking up with any other nations leaving and as such it's massively in the EU's interest (and anyone else that wants the EU kept together such as America) to make sure Britain suffers upon exiting the EU. They'll have to do this to send a message that leaving the EU does not pay in order to dissuade others from following suit.
It all goes into one big pool and that pool is distributed quite well by the EU. The UK receives a disproportionately high amount of science funding (more than our government could realistically fund) because we're recognised as being good at it, and being capable of offering a better return on investment than many other countries. We lose out in other areas (for example, France gets far more agriculture money), and the newer, poorer states get more money for development. This typically pays off in the long term because those newer poorer states start to improve, get wealthier and become places we can better sell our goods, and obtain talent from.
So it's not as simple as pay money in, then get the exact same proportion out minus the middle man's fees, it's about creating a massive talent pool to do science on a scale no single nation could afford to and then have member states bid for that money with a committee of actual experts deciding on what bids win. That's better than the typical UK version which is to have an incredibly small pool of money and give it to whatever project gives the often clueless science minister of the day the biggest hardon.
I think you're absolutely right in theory, we could do things better and more efficiently than we do via the EU, but the UK is such a broken state that it can't look after itself. We're reliant on the EU to protect us on everything from civil liberties to sane science funding, and from sane environmental policy to democracy (here in the UK we use FPTP so ironically my European vote matters more than my vote for my own government because my general election vote is meaningless, but my EU representative vote is proportional). I'd vote out if we ever had hope of a representative, democratic, forward thinking government, but right now and for the foreseeable future we don't. The vested interests like the Conservatives and Labour who can repeatedly get 100% of power with as little as 32% of popular support make sure that it will remain that way, so I'm doing the only sensible thing and voting for the parliament that does actually give me a say - the European parliament. I don't have a vote in general elections because of FPTP so the last thing I want to see is even more power shifted to a parliament that's put into power with a broken bastardised non-democracy.
"Fine. They have already tried that on Russia, and so far it is doing Russia a whole lot of good, while severely harming European economies. (Not that the politicians care what happens to working people or businesses)."
What kind of alternate reality do you live in? The Russian rouble has plummeted to post-90's crash lows, it's in recession, seeing year on year economic shrinkage of 3%, inflation is in double digits, and it's burnt through billions of US dollars in reserve trying to stabilise things. It's being forced to sell off state assets into private hands, and it's had to cancel in all but name it's flagship 5th generation fighter programme (PAK-FA orders cut to a mere 12 aircraft) and it has been forced to halt it's invasion of South-Eastern Ukraine. People are starving because they can no longer afford food, and business are closing and people are losing their jobs left and right. Political freedom has reached a further low as government has cracked down ever harder on dissenting voices with a spike in political assassinations, and freedom to travel has been massively restricted.
Now, I'm not going to pretend Europe's economic progress is great because it's not, it's pretty poor and it's pretty anaemic, but it is at least back in to growth, unemployment is declining, it still has a free press, and it's people are still free to travel. Also it's managed to diversify it's raw materials base away from Russia.
So please explain in what possible universe recession, mass job losses, increasing poverty, increasing authoritarianism and decreasing freedom and so forth are better than growth and continued freedoms? You really think Europe needs Russia to buy it's agricultural goods more than Russia needs Europe to buy it's oil? The numbers don't lie, Russia has been hit way harder economically by the economic warfare waged against it than Europe has. The economic damage to Europe by action against Russia is absolutely minuscule compared to the widespread devastation inflicted against Russia's economy. Russia would have collapsed altogether by now were it not for it's massive currency reserves, but they will not last forever.
I think you really need to learn an awful lot about the comparative state of Russian and European economies before commenting again, your understanding is the exact opposite of reality. You don't even have to take my word, or European sources for it's Russia's own government, central bank, and state propaganda agencies like RT and TASS have had no choice but to admit that Russia has seen serious economic harm and economic contraction even if it's tried to put a propaganda spin on it by pretending it doesn't matter.
"The use of another currency across a large area of the world is also likely to bring one's earthly existence to a rapid close, as Colonel Qadafi found. He was planning to introduce a gold dinar as a common currency throughout Africa."
I don't really see how this can be laid at the doorstep of US policy to maintain the primacy of the dollar given that Obama did what he always does - dithered about, completely unable to make a foreign policy decision - only for the French followed by the British to give up on waiting for Obama to do anything and launch strikes against Gaddafi. It's not clear why Britain with it's pound or France as a single Euro member state of many would do this to protect the dollar. Obama was forced into action by not wanting to look like he'd been left behind on decision making by France and Britain, even though he clearly had.
For what it's worth, Britain itself as a major banking nation has been helping the likes of China on world currency markets being a major Western nation to support China's development bank against America's will. It was also the first nation outside of China to officially work with China's central bank on trading their currency abroad. Thankfully, the US hasn't yet invaded us despite our efforts in the UK to increase plurality of worthwhile global reserve currencies.
I don't think any single factor theories about US global policy ever make sense, I think the US does what it does for a multitude of reasons ranging from oil, to currency, to maintaining military bases and protecting trade routes, to playing politics back home to the idea of American exceptionalism, or in the case of Afghanistan in 2001, for simple outright revenge. As soon as you try and simplify geopolitics down to one single factor like this you inevitably end up with parts of a theory that just doesn't make sense and you have to try and pretend it was something it wasn't - in your case here, Libya, and then it begins to sound like a conspiracy theory (even though there is some merit to other parts of it).
I think you're confusing open borders with free movement of EU citizens, they're not the same thing. When you enter the UK you still have to present a valid passport if you enter via the official channels. The UK still has full control of immigration outside of movement of EU citizens and so anyone entering Europe under the current immigration crisis, who are all non-european can still be completely rejected by the UK - those who enter are either those we choose to let in because we allow some asylum seekers, or those smuggling in via unofficial channels. The GP is right therefore, the impact of the current migrant crisis on us is absolutely no different whether we're an EU member state or not.
The unofficial channels used by people smugglers will exist and be policed regardless of EU membership. The only immigration issue that comes from being an EU member is that of immigration from other EU member states.
None of those things other than pulling into a hanger are going to block a laser signal for any substantial amount of time, they're not going to result in any kind of extended blackout of communications.
If you're in a hangar you don't need it anyway, because you could just use physical transfer of a storage device, wireless, or a good old physical network cable to transmit the data.
Someone else suggested birds, how they imagine a flock of birds might consistently fly above the transmitter and receiver of a jet flying at hundreds of miles an hour I don't know, let alone when the aircraft is at 40,000ft.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with that sort of analysis is that it's impossible to reasonably compare a country of 320,000 people to countries of between 10million and 80million.
Iceland is smaller than many European cities. It's also worth noting that even countries that didn't have to bail anyone out are currently struggling with economic troubles (Canada, Australia, China).
It's not therefore clear that Iceland's actions relating to banking is what really saved it's economy, furthermore, as you note yourself it's going to hand away 6% of GDP every year for 6 years come 2017 - most developed countries are happy to see 2 - 3% GDP growth per year, so Iceland is effectively going to be giving away between 2x and 3x that each year for 6 years. In other words, they've largely just deferred their recession. One might argue that's a sensible thing to do as it's easier to weather recession when the rest of the world is growing, but if China doesn't pick up soon they may find that they've actually deferred it until the worst possible time rather than simply getting it over and done with when everyone else did.
As an aside, the eurozone hasn't had an 8 year recession, a recession requires two subsequent quarters of negative growth and the eurozone was only in that situation back in 2008 and 2009 when every other large western economy was. I think you're confusing recession for low growth, which is the actual problem.
So long story short, it's not really clear that Iceland hasn't done anything other than delay (and potentially prolong) it's pain. What it did was certainly "different", but was it succesful? Who knows because it'll be another 7 years before they're done with it. Deferring a problem doesn't mean it's gone away.
"Six members of the House of Lords, three former Conservative MPs and dozens of donors to UK political parties have had offshore assets."
If you live in the UK that's not in the remotest bit surprising, Lord Ashcroft one of those mentioned was exposed way back in the early 2000s, and evidence has trickled out about him ever since. There was a massive uproar because he was a non-Dom for tax reasons, and yet was allowed to be involved in politics. The public weren't happy that someone who isn't actually British was allowed to partake in British governance, and so there was a big push to make him drop that status. He did and has avoided (and possibly evaded) tax in other ways. It seems those could well now have been exposed also.
The others named aren't new names on this front either, they're all fairly well known for being as dodgy as they come on this front. There are some that are equally as dodgy but that aren't named - those ones probably just use a different firm.
In many countries, rather than being paid directly you can register as a business, whether that's as a sole trader, or some other type really depends on your country, it's laws, and it's options.
Whilst it's getting harder in some countries, such as the UK, what you were long able to do is get your employer to pay your business entity, rather than you, and then pay yourself from your company the minimum salary you can get away with that is either tax free, or low tax. The extra money paid to your business will typically then be paid to you via a mechanism such as dividends, which you will not pay standard income tax bands on, but will pay capital gains bands, which are generally lower.
So for example, in the UK, the tax bands on standard income are roughly as follows:
£0 - £10,000 = 0% tax
£10,000 - £42,000 = 20% tax
£42,000 - £150,000 = 40% tax
£150,000+ = 45% tax
So if you were earning say £60k a year, you'd pay 0% on the first £10,000, 20% on the £32,000 between £10,000 and £42,000, and then 40% on the £18,000 between £42,000 and £60,000. That is:
£0 (0% rate) + £6,400 (20% rate) + £7,200 (40% rate) = £13,600
(Note: You also pay NI tax in the UK, but I'm keeping it simple here).
Now, if you'd instead paid via your company using the aforementioned low salary + capital gains combo, the capital gains tax rates were, until Friday I believe roughly:
£0 - £11,000 = 0% tax
£11,000+ = 20% tax IF you are paying 40% income tax
£11,000+ = 10% tax IF you are NOT paying 40% income tax
So you'd end up paying:
£0 (0% income tax) + £0 (0% CGT tax allowance) + £3,900 (10% CGT tax) = £3,900 tax.
This is because you're paying yourself a salary of £10,000 on which no income tax is owed, and then £50,000 in dividends which are owed at only the non-40% CGT rate, because your salary paid to yourself isn't in the 40% bracket, so 10% is owed on this.
Now, you do typically have other costs from doing this - you have to pay a chartered accountant for example, which narrows the gap, but these costs are typically fixed.
Again this is a very simplified example, other taxes and costs do come in to play, and countries have been cracking down on this kind of avoidance to varying degrees, but hopefully this illustrates the sort of tactic that has long been abused. Effectively it's only worth it if your salary justifies it - the problem is if you're on a lower salary (say £30k), you may find that by the time you've paid your accountant et. al. that you've not really achieved anything other than wasting an awful lot of your time filling in tax returns - it's not worth the effort unless your salary is high enough for the fixed costs and hassle to disappear into irrelevance compared to the tax saving.
Again, depending on the country you're in this may not even be possible any more (if it ever was), or the rates may be adjusted to make it not worthwhile - i.e. some countries have more progressive tax rates than the UK, and some have smaller gaps between income and CGT rates. I don't know how the numbers work out in the US to put it in the context of the GP's point.
But convictions aren't done based on absolute proof, because otherwise it'd be impossible to convict anyone ever.
If someone murders someone and their DNA is seen at the crime and they're caught on CCTV, and the murder weapon is found at their house, and they have motive, and they confessed during police interview, they could just block any requirement for absolute proof by simply claiming their DNA was planted, the CCTV was just a lookalike, the murder weapon was planted, and the confession was coerced.
In absence of evidence to back up any of their defence (i.e. if no evidence of coercion, no evidence of DNA or the weapon being planted, no evidence of a doppleganger even existing, the most likely conclusion is that they were the perpetrator and yet if they were your suggestion is that they should go free because you're effectively arguing that "I didn't do it!" is a legitimate defence against every court trial ever.
It's ultimately a balance, as you increase standards of evidence you decrease the amount of wrongful convictions, but you increase the amount of actual criminals who can get away with their crimes. If you decrease the standards you increase the amount of wrongful convictions but you also convict a lot more actual criminals. To retain a reasonable level of convictions of actual criminals you have to accept that there will be some wrongful convictions purely because of the numbers involved.
Whilst it sucks for people who are wrongfully convicted most people would argue that one extra wrongful conviction for every additional 10,000 correct convictions of people who couldn't otherwise be convicted because of an unachievably high standard of evidence is an acceptable price to pay. For some crimes, for example, sexual assault, the conviction rate is already far too low (as measured through statistical comparison of conviction rates of other crimes) because it all too often comes down to he-said she-said, which doesn't meet the existing required standard of evidence.
So what your effectively advocating is that we should prevent 10s of people being wrongfully convicted each year which is fine, but you're proposing a solution whereby orders of magnitude more actual criminals can get away with their crimes. You can't have one without the other unless you also change some other variable - like going down the route of a police state and reducing freedom to make it easier to obtain higher standards of evidence due to CCTV in everyone's house and on every street that the state has access to.
What you want to achieve is noble, but the solution you're proposing creates bigger problems than it solves. You're trading improved justice for 10s of wrongfully convicted people for loss of justice for thousands of people. That's not an improvement by any objective measure, because ability to obtain justice is the overall goal here.
I don't think you know the first thing about the Wii U, it wasn't priced in a range "poor people" could afford, and it comfortably supported 1080p in just about all of it's games.
It was never designed with the ultra-realistic graphics of the PS4/X1 in mind that's for sure, but the rendering requirements of the cartoony style graphics Nintendo typically requires are lower anyway so it could get away with being underpowered compared to those consoles.
Ultimately it was a console that had an excellent selection of 1st party titles let down by lack of 3rd party support failing to fill the long periods between releases of the excellent 1st party titles. If anything it's major shortcoming is that it was more expensive than the original Wii so wasn't quite in the impulse buy territory of pricing for many people like the Wii was.
So as a "poor person" (I must be, because I bought a Wii U) that also owns an X1 and a PS4 I can comfortably say that you have no idea what you're talking about. Nintendo made some massive mis-steps and they deservedly paid the price for that, but taking a step back and looking at the games the system has, how they play, and the quality of them? It seems hard to fault the device. It took a long time to reach a point where it has a good library of high quality games because it was so dependent on 1st party releases, but it has a decent library now and I'd argue it's a console with a games library that's well worth buying nowadays.
If you want AAA shooters and action games then sure, it's probably not for you. But if you like to mix it up a little with games that are colourful rather than depressing, fun rather than serious, and offer a fair bit of puzzling requiring you to engage your brain rather than mindless on-rails storylines and trigger pulling then it's well worth buying alongside your X1 and/or PS4 to give you that kind of variation - those platforms just don't offer the sort of game, the look and feel, and style of challenge that the Wii U does, so it complements well. As the saying goes, variety is the spice of life.
There are other great non-Mario games on the platform too. Captain Toad Treasure Tracker, Pikmin 3, and Lego City Undercover for example were all excellent AAA titles of a quality that the other consoles sorely lack.
Don't get me wrong, I have my X1 and PS4 as well, and I play the X1 by far the most out of the three, but if it weren't for the WiiU, there'd have been some absolutely fantastic titles that would have just never seen the light of day and there'd be a hole the size of hundreds of hours of incredibly enjoyable gaming missing from my life over the last few years without it.
Web blocking certainly is legal under UK law, that doesn't make it right of course, but it's certainly legal because we have no inherent legal right in the UK to wholly uncensored internet access.
I'd like to think though that this guy has a reasonable chance of going free (though it might not happen until appeal, lower courts are generally inept on technical issues - see the Doncaster airport bomb threat tweet case). The OiNK owner got away with it and he was running an actual piracy site rather than a simply list of proxys, so mostly I suspect this is the police abusing their power to try and make a point that even if you do nothing wrong they can still fuck up their life. That's obviously unacceptable and if it is the case the police will need to be heavily reprimanded for it, and the people pushing for prosecution fired.
I wont hold my breath though, these guys are part of the City of London police and it doesn't get much more corrupt than that bunch of corporate puppets. Those guys are basically a government mandated, publicly funded, corporate run hit squad and are the complete anti-thesis of the concept of policing by consent that has been at the core of British policing since it's very inception. PIPCUs entire modus operandi is bullying and intimidation, it's what they do and how they operate.
It's just a shame more people don't stand up to them - they've only been able to claim they're successful because too many companies have done as PIPCU has asked (i.e. pulled advertising from sites PIPCU doesn't like) rather than tell them to go fuck themselves. The sooner PIPCU's tactics start failing, the sooner they'll get their funding pulled and the sooner this embarrassment to British policing can be swept into the bowels of the history books and forgotten about.
"You understand what marketing is, right?"
It sounds like you don't because you clearly lack not the slightest clue about what modern online marketing campaigns look like.
You probably also think "This person got in her car, and you'll never guess what happened next!" clickbait isn't a marketing tactic either and is a straight up honest insightful headline too right?
Even without that his assertion that without open borders Europe was free from terrorism is incredibly laughable. There has actually been far less terrorism in Europe since open borders, though that's frankly because borders open or not have had no impact on reducing terrorism and other factors (like the end of the cold war) have had a far bigger impact. 9/11 in itself made the business of terrorism a whole lot harder - no one wants to hijack an airliner now simply to make a political statement since the stakes changed for passengers from sit quietly and you'll eventually be let go, to sit quietly and we'll fly you into a building - passengers wont just sit there and not rise up against the hijackers now when they know that everyone dying is a highly likely outcome.
If he really believes that between WW2 and the late 90s there were no major terrorist attacks in Europe then his obviously far too ignorant to be even engaging in such a discussion. Even outside of the IRA there was Black September (Munich), there was Spain being hit by ETA, and folks like Carlos the Jackal, along with many Mafia terrorism incidents in Italy and countless smaller separatist groups carrying out fairly major attacks. You have to have largely lived under a rock to not know this as so much of it has reached common conciousness such as the iconic scenes of the SAS at the Iranian Embassy Siege in London, or the film, Munich, or any countless number of other TV shows, films, or documentaries about these sorts of incidents.
But I don't believe he's that ignorant, frankly he's doing exactly what everyone here complains about politicians doing - he's using the aftermath of a terrorist attack to use the politics of fear to push a political agenda that's entirely irrelevant to to the attack (namely, he wants dismemberment of the EU and thinks a terrorist attack is a good opportunity to push that agenda). The politics of fear has as much legitimacy in pushing this kind of agenda as it does being used by governments to push for more mass surveillance etc.
Even if the IRA did phone in all the time, which as you rightly point out, they most definitely didn't, I still struggle to see how that makes it not terrorism anyway, or acceptable terrorism, or however else he wishes to justify it. Hundreds still died to people carrying out attacks often against civilian targets to push a political and religious agenda in the exact same way today's attackers presumably (presumably because I'm assuming they're with ISIS or at least pushing their agenda) have.
It's hard to quietly arrest someone that's running around a major European capital city with an AK-47.
No matter how hard you might try, someone's going to see and film the guys in body armour with assault rifles running around after him in countries where armed police are a rare sight.
I'm sure they were and I'm sure a lot of people would be, but if Britain has no legal right to use force to give them it then why is it Britain's job anymore than anyone elses, particularly theirs, to fight for it?
As usual Britain would be in a lose-lose situation, bitched at if we don't, and bitched at if we do, so taking the option that minimises casualties, and prevents deterioration of international stability is the most sane choice.
If people are concerned about the people's right to democracy and think a military solution is the answer then maybe they could write to their own governments to demand they intervene militarily? We've spilt more than our fair share of blood over the years doing exact that and the people of Hong Kong have everything they need to maintain their own democracy - we've given them a far better head start than most nations lacking it have had, both those that were British colonies and those that were not.
I'm not sure what's more disturbing, the fact that you're denying posting what is a blatant slashvertisement (please read what you've posted, it reads exactly like an advertisement and is pointless as a question because it's so entirely subjective) or that you're running Slashdot but aren't aware of the history it's suffered under previous owners of it's user being piss fed up of owning companies doing nothing but posting controversial articles to create flame wars because they stir page hits.
It doesn't really matter what the comments say when the headline is clearly designed to raise awareness of the fact Apple is releasing a new phone and iPad and asks if you're excited.
A non slashvertisment headline asking the same thing would've run somewhere more along the lines of a simple "Has Apple lost it's charm?".
Even if we had a strong enough Royal Navy to hold off the entire Chinese mainland what good would it have done us? We'd have been a global pariah for illegally annexing foreign sovereign territory. Our reputation was hammered enough for simply invading and occupying Iraq, that wasn't even an annexation. What good would annexing part of China's territory and the inevitable hundreds of thousands of deaths and billions in costs do?
Democracy is all well and good, but sometimes if that's what people want they have to fight for it themselves. Little use us doing it for them if it destroys us economically, militarily, and politically. The days of British imperialism are dead, it doesn't hurt, because it's a good thing - the world has moved on. We still have plenty of territory that actually belongs to us by way of the countless patches of British Overseas Territory that exist without us trying to seize by force and claim and administer that which doesn't.
Well I'm glad to see the new owners have decided to pursue slashvertisements as questions as if we'll somehow be outwitted by that kind of move and not notice a blatant slashvertisement when we see one.
No BizWank or whatever you're called now, we're not fooled. A slashvertisement is a slashvertisment, no matter how you try sand dress it up. Actual news, not adverts pretending to be news please.
"The Brits gave Hong Kong island back to China for a good reason."
Yeah, because our 99 year lease was up.
Three of those are part of China already, the other three aren't physically attached to China. North Korea is physically attached.
The West wont touch NK because of China, China doesn't want to deal with NK because it doesn't want to deal with millions of desperate migrants out of NK, nor does it want a likely Western oriented nation (United Korea) directly on it's doorstep.
The calculus will change if and when North Korea becomes a bigger problem to have on your doorstep than a Western friendly nation would and the cost of refugees ends up being lower than the cost of a madman. China doesn't want to have to occupy North Korea because it's already got enough restive regions on it's plate to deal with such as Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang province etc. without having to add yet another one. Contrary to China's big strong image it's a fragile divided nation only one arab-spring type event away from seeing a pandemic of breakaway states. It doesn't need another one of those on it's plate if it can help it.
Kim exists as he does because he's convenient to the Chinese now - having a buffer nation to retain extremely poor North Koreans so that you don't have to deal with them yourself, and to separate you physically from a Western facing nation like South Korea is extremely convenient for China. As soon as he becomes much more inconvenient he and his state will cease to exist as they do now - if Kim keeps people poor the number of people trying to escape to China will only increase and so China will suffer the refugee influx regardless. If he keeps acting in a manner that forces a greater Western military buildup in the seas around the area then the relevance of that buffer zone between them and the West will start to erode also.
Kim can push, but only so far, and if he crosses a line he'll no longer be useful.
That sounds like an awfully circular argument - no one can use anonymity to try and pursue their political views because it might cause anonymity to be taken away. If people can't use anonymity for things like pursuing political views then what's the point in it anyway? Something that's there, but can't be used, is about as useful as something just not being there in the first place.
And yet the UK persists with First Past the Post that leaves more British citizens disenfranchised than they are when they place their European Parliament vote which is based on a form of proportional representation.
I fail to see how localism is served by EU exit when the EU grants more localised regions actual political representation than most citizens receive when they're not represented under FPTP.
If anything from what I can see see EU exit only serves one group of people - those who have already ensured that the British parliament is undemocratic often obtaining 100% of power with little more than 30% of the national vote. If anything the EU vote is about centralisation of power, making sure Westminster becomes an unchallenged bastion of power of which typically almost two thirds of the country have absolutely no say in.
It shouldn't be surprising that many of the same people supporting EU exit are the same people who are consistently against a more democratic UK having repeatedly blocked moves to a more proportional or fairer form of representation, who block reform of the Lords to make it democratic, who support single vested interest monopolisation of important sectors such as media and news, and who wholeheartedly defend political moves towards police state. They don't want more power for us, they want more power for them, they hate the EU because it's a major barrier in preventing the authoritarianism they so desire, because that's precisely what the EU (the then EC) was designed to do in the wake of World War II. When people like Farage say they'll quit and don't because they simply can't cope with loss of power one would think the sort of authorianism such Brexiters desire is obvious, but apparently some are still in absolutely love with the idea of it and are willing to support the March towards it.
The out argument would make sense if it was backed by a promise for healthy democracy in the UK, but it isn't, because it's about the exact opposite of that.
I'm just fucking glad I have my exit strategy sorted by way of a wife that has dual citizenship. I just hope everyone that's left behind is willing to live with what they've voted for and when the boomers succeed in kicking out everyone not British I hope they'll be happy cleaning out their own bed pans, because there'll be no one else left to do it for them.
"As for the retaliation, we won't know if that would be the case until the UK actually left the EU. Kind of like the status of a certain cat in a box."
We wont know with absolute certainty, but it'd be naive to bet on anything else.
If the UK leaves the EU the EU will be desperate to stop itself breaking up with any other nations leaving and as such it's massively in the EU's interest (and anyone else that wants the EU kept together such as America) to make sure Britain suffers upon exiting the EU. They'll have to do this to send a message that leaving the EU does not pay in order to dissuade others from following suit.
It all goes into one big pool and that pool is distributed quite well by the EU. The UK receives a disproportionately high amount of science funding (more than our government could realistically fund) because we're recognised as being good at it, and being capable of offering a better return on investment than many other countries. We lose out in other areas (for example, France gets far more agriculture money), and the newer, poorer states get more money for development. This typically pays off in the long term because those newer poorer states start to improve, get wealthier and become places we can better sell our goods, and obtain talent from.
So it's not as simple as pay money in, then get the exact same proportion out minus the middle man's fees, it's about creating a massive talent pool to do science on a scale no single nation could afford to and then have member states bid for that money with a committee of actual experts deciding on what bids win. That's better than the typical UK version which is to have an incredibly small pool of money and give it to whatever project gives the often clueless science minister of the day the biggest hardon.
I think you're absolutely right in theory, we could do things better and more efficiently than we do via the EU, but the UK is such a broken state that it can't look after itself. We're reliant on the EU to protect us on everything from civil liberties to sane science funding, and from sane environmental policy to democracy (here in the UK we use FPTP so ironically my European vote matters more than my vote for my own government because my general election vote is meaningless, but my EU representative vote is proportional). I'd vote out if we ever had hope of a representative, democratic, forward thinking government, but right now and for the foreseeable future we don't. The vested interests like the Conservatives and Labour who can repeatedly get 100% of power with as little as 32% of popular support make sure that it will remain that way, so I'm doing the only sensible thing and voting for the parliament that does actually give me a say - the European parliament. I don't have a vote in general elections because of FPTP so the last thing I want to see is even more power shifted to a parliament that's put into power with a broken bastardised non-democracy.
"Fine. They have already tried that on Russia, and so far it is doing Russia a whole lot of good, while severely harming European economies. (Not that the politicians care what happens to working people or businesses)."
What kind of alternate reality do you live in? The Russian rouble has plummeted to post-90's crash lows, it's in recession, seeing year on year economic shrinkage of 3%, inflation is in double digits, and it's burnt through billions of US dollars in reserve trying to stabilise things. It's being forced to sell off state assets into private hands, and it's had to cancel in all but name it's flagship 5th generation fighter programme (PAK-FA orders cut to a mere 12 aircraft) and it has been forced to halt it's invasion of South-Eastern Ukraine. People are starving because they can no longer afford food, and business are closing and people are losing their jobs left and right. Political freedom has reached a further low as government has cracked down ever harder on dissenting voices with a spike in political assassinations, and freedom to travel has been massively restricted.
Now, I'm not going to pretend Europe's economic progress is great because it's not, it's pretty poor and it's pretty anaemic, but it is at least back in to growth, unemployment is declining, it still has a free press, and it's people are still free to travel. Also it's managed to diversify it's raw materials base away from Russia.
So please explain in what possible universe recession, mass job losses, increasing poverty, increasing authoritarianism and decreasing freedom and so forth are better than growth and continued freedoms? You really think Europe needs Russia to buy it's agricultural goods more than Russia needs Europe to buy it's oil? The numbers don't lie, Russia has been hit way harder economically by the economic warfare waged against it than Europe has. The economic damage to Europe by action against Russia is absolutely minuscule compared to the widespread devastation inflicted against Russia's economy. Russia would have collapsed altogether by now were it not for it's massive currency reserves, but they will not last forever.
I think you really need to learn an awful lot about the comparative state of Russian and European economies before commenting again, your understanding is the exact opposite of reality. You don't even have to take my word, or European sources for it's Russia's own government, central bank, and state propaganda agencies like RT and TASS have had no choice but to admit that Russia has seen serious economic harm and economic contraction even if it's tried to put a propaganda spin on it by pretending it doesn't matter.
"The use of another currency across a large area of the world is also likely to bring one's earthly existence to a rapid close, as Colonel Qadafi found. He was planning to introduce a gold dinar as a common currency throughout Africa."
I don't really see how this can be laid at the doorstep of US policy to maintain the primacy of the dollar given that Obama did what he always does - dithered about, completely unable to make a foreign policy decision - only for the French followed by the British to give up on waiting for Obama to do anything and launch strikes against Gaddafi. It's not clear why Britain with it's pound or France as a single Euro member state of many would do this to protect the dollar. Obama was forced into action by not wanting to look like he'd been left behind on decision making by France and Britain, even though he clearly had.
For what it's worth, Britain itself as a major banking nation has been helping the likes of China on world currency markets being a major Western nation to support China's development bank against America's will. It was also the first nation outside of China to officially work with China's central bank on trading their currency abroad. Thankfully, the US hasn't yet invaded us despite our efforts in the UK to increase plurality of worthwhile global reserve currencies.
I don't think any single factor theories about US global policy ever make sense, I think the US does what it does for a multitude of reasons ranging from oil, to currency, to maintaining military bases and protecting trade routes, to playing politics back home to the idea of American exceptionalism, or in the case of Afghanistan in 2001, for simple outright revenge. As soon as you try and simplify geopolitics down to one single factor like this you inevitably end up with parts of a theory that just doesn't make sense and you have to try and pretend it was something it wasn't - in your case here, Libya, and then it begins to sound like a conspiracy theory (even though there is some merit to other parts of it).
I think you're confusing open borders with free movement of EU citizens, they're not the same thing. When you enter the UK you still have to present a valid passport if you enter via the official channels. The UK still has full control of immigration outside of movement of EU citizens and so anyone entering Europe under the current immigration crisis, who are all non-european can still be completely rejected by the UK - those who enter are either those we choose to let in because we allow some asylum seekers, or those smuggling in via unofficial channels. The GP is right therefore, the impact of the current migrant crisis on us is absolutely no different whether we're an EU member state or not.
The unofficial channels used by people smugglers will exist and be policed regardless of EU membership. The only immigration issue that comes from being an EU member is that of immigration from other EU member states.
None of those things other than pulling into a hanger are going to block a laser signal for any substantial amount of time, they're not going to result in any kind of extended blackout of communications.
If you're in a hangar you don't need it anyway, because you could just use physical transfer of a storage device, wireless, or a good old physical network cable to transmit the data.
Someone else suggested birds, how they imagine a flock of birds might consistently fly above the transmitter and receiver of a jet flying at hundreds of miles an hour I don't know, let alone when the aircraft is at 40,000ft.