"Unless that user is stupidly out of date."
Or just middling stupid & won't try 'cos it's not .docx (really stupid won't notice & just blindly click it anyway along with anything else they receive).
32773 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I don't know the technology but our gas supply must have been installed with something of that nature possibly in that sort of timeframe - there's certainly no sunken remnant of a trench like that for the drain, water & phone. Possibly also the electricity supply and that must have been installed in 1968.
"most people believe that when they speak to an Alexa-enabled device, it converts their voice into a set of digital computer instructions… They do not expect that Alexa is creating and storing permanent recording of their voice."
Really? I wouldn't trust any such device not to store it. Not even if the vendor outright denied it. (Never believe a rumour until it's been officially denied - Jim Hacker)
The trees are a regular crop and not a problem. The standing crop is temporarily sequestered carbon so growing trees for paper is mildly beneficial.
It's the lack of thought about incidental effects such as transport, processing and disposal of a totally useless batch of leaflets by a group who ought to be against it that's the objection. That and the keep-your-filthy-hands-off-my-car issue but as it happened they'd already done their round of the car park when I got there and didn't come back again.
"She pretended to be one when she served under Cameron"
Quite. I'm sure that, like most people in Westminster she expected Remain to win & didn't want to end up on the wrong side. Her background in the HO would ensure that she would want to get as far away from the restraining influence of the EU as possible.
With a country hooked on cheap credit all that money had to go somewhere and that somewhere was property. If you got property prices returned to affordable now the mess left by negative credit on the banking industry would be even bigger than it was when dealer Brown left. And as the only remedy seems to be more and cheaper credit it's only going to get worse.
"A tax on turnover would be more efficient and harder to avoid though rather painful for companies that were genuinely loss making."
Genuinely loss making businesses are in trouble any way. A turnover tax would push a lot of genuinely profitable-but-only-just businesses into loss. That puts their employees out of work. That then increases costs for the country supporting the unemployed. That pushes up taxes so the turnover tax has to go up and make more businesses unprofitable.
Nothing's easy when positive feedback loops are involved.
"The fact that Lout Cook Islands is paying only £10 per box of turds means it makes most of the profit and pays none of the tax."
The reason it can afford to charge little or no CT, of course, is that it has a small population and the income it brings in is worth much more than is lost from the taxation it would have got from local businesses if it had tax rates comparable with the UK's.
You seem to be repeatedly missing the A/Cs point. Amazon has the reputation of reinvesting income to grow instead of taking on loans. That means that real profits, on which taxes are charged is a lower percentage of turnover.
You could, of course, replace taxes on profits with taxes on turnover but you then make businesses in markets that operate on low profit margins go under, either because they then run at a loss or they have to raise their prices and lose custom.
I agree that there are business models which rely on constructing internal trade so that the biggest mark-ups happen to take place in low CT countries and it may well be that Amazon's business model includes an element of that. I've also pointed out in another post that the competitive market in corporation tax on multinationals is tilted in favour of countries with a relatively small local economy and that's not something the UK should want to be in a position to take advantage of.
One point that is relevant in the present case is whether AWS (or, indeed any multi-national alternative) relies on performing the work in a lower tax country because that would mean transferring data and, given the nature of the data this ought to be a major concern. Given the US's attitude of "what's yours is mine" in terms of data there ought to be considerable concern about data sovereignty even if all the processing is carried out in the UK.
Here we go again, having to explain the obvious about the fact that for multinationals there's a competitive market in taxation.
You attract business by having lower tax rates. If you're a country's finance minister you have to work out whether that's a good thing to do because your local businesses pay the same take rates as multinationals. If you have a large economy of local businesses lower tax rates mean you bring in less taxes. You might attract some big multinationals but their taxes won't compensate for the losses.
If you have a small local economy bringing in multinationals is a double win. The multinational taxes more than cover the losses from local businesses so you're in the black and the lower tax rates help local businesses become more profitable. Having a small local economy means either having a small population for that economy to support or having a larger but impoverished population.
Being in the EU there's no legal reason why we couldn't lower our CT rates to compete with Ireland or Luxembourg - after all, those two are also EU members. If we'd tried it in the past HM Treasury would have been greatly out of pocket because of the lower tax take from local businesses and VAT and/or income tax/NI would have had to go up and I'm sure you'd have complained about that.
You could, however, be right about our having greater freedom outside the EU. Remember that the precondition for making money from multi-nationals is to have a much smaller local economy and if the population size doesn't change that means they each get poorer. Are you quite sure that's that you want to do?
"prolific, skilled and cynical cyber-criminal,"
It's more or less part of court ritual. Prosecution will present the offender, however inept, as a criminal mastermind, defence will present them as an innocent abroad and easily lead by the bad crowd they unknowingly fell in with (or Aspergers for shorthand). It's all aimed at determining sentence.
"f we did that, we wouldn’t be in the telecommunications business, we would be in the software engineering business."
I'd have thought that if you're in any business, telecommunication included, where software provides a non-negligible part of the product you are in the software engineering business whether you like it or not or whether you realise it or not. Not realising it is a bit of a worry.
"Unlike Curran, Crosbie put in over 20 years of service before stepping into the TSB CEO's shoes"
Huh? The figures given in the next para amount to 10 years experience. 10 years isn't inconsiderable and perhaps is appropriate for a job two levels down. In some shops 10 years is enough to be moved to a desk next to the door while the employer looks for "younger, fresher" and, coincidentally, cheaper talent.
"'Facial groupings "are not accessible beyond the context of the device file system' and 'AI used on your local device to help tag photos'"
Look carefully at what legalese doesn't say. Note that your quote doesn't say processing is local. It says something quite convoluted which might lead you to think it does but it actually doesn't.