Posts by LucreLout

Re: Start with the basics and work from there

That was done about a quarter millennia ago.

Correction, that was dictated about a quarter millenia ago, when international operations were exceedingly difficult to manage because of transportation speed/cost and the snail pace communications systems. The world has changed and governments, having lost the respect of the people, are not in a position to dictate.

So, given the world today, and the waste in existing governmental spending, define fair?

in turn the country could afford to build and maintain roads, hire police forces to prevent highway robbery, educate the populace and later to provide things like healthcare and pensions

Which neatly accounts for about 10% of the tax take. The rest they fritter away and waste.

You're confusing emotional irrelevancies, such as the public services you'd like someone else to fund for you, with what is fair or even realistic to expect companies to pay. A given company may have shareholders in 200+ countries around the world - how much do you think they value public spending in, for example Ireland, if they live in Uganda?

Companies decided that they could find and exploit loopholes and not pay their taxes, and all of a sudden are competing on how little tax they can pay. If you were defining "unfair" then this is probably it.

Unfair would better be defined as forcibly extracting from someone, using menaces, threats of impriosonment, and life altering sanctions, that which they would otherwise not give voluntarily. Which is the basis of all taxation.

What is fair about asking a company headquartered in say America, to pay taxes for services you wish to enjoy but otherwise cannot afford in the UK? What is fair about asking their global shareholders to pay for it? Sorry, but you haven't arrived at anything remotely resembling a working definition of fair, and so cannot use it for a predicate to raise taxes.

Re: taxation vs economic activity

I think you should have added to your comment that the state/country need tax money to provide affordable education and health care, for roads and bridges and more.

Unfortunately they waste it instead on wages for so very many jobs that simply don't need doing. Too much administration, too many middle managers, etc etc etc. The last thing they spend it on is the roads.....

Physical presence provides an extremely strong drag on being able to go jurisdiction shopping

It creates no drag at all. See Boots for an example.

If you are the UK you will quite quickly cut the tax take from all the physically-present companies mentioned.

Leaving them more money to invest in growth which then leads to a higher tax base.

Worse, in the slightly longer term you will end up pushing an even larger percentage of your workforce into fake self-employment.

The difference is nearly double already. Dropping it further won't inentivise anyone that isn't already playing that game.

It turns out that the hopelessly simplistic analysis you bought into wasn't just bad because it made us unpopular tax haven pariahs. It has actually cost us billions of pounds.

No, I'm afraid its just that you don't understand taxation or economics sufficiently well to reason through the proposition. This is what I do for a very well paid living. Sorry, but you really are so far wide of the mark as to leave me baffled as to how you've arrived at the position you have.

Re: Taxing revenue is inherently unfair

So your solutions is? You are very quiet about that - note that "taxing profits" has proved to be a complete failure ... the FANG companies don't make profits "on the books".

Sure they do - they just don't make them on the books of non-competetive tax regimes.

You have two realistically workable options for adjusting the tax amount paid, and really only two. They are:

1) An internationally accepted and levied flat tax

2) Be a competetive place to pay CT - and by competetive I really mean cheap (low CT, say 5% and you'd corner the market with ballooning tax take)

Anything else is just playig the same game we play now, but with marginally different rules. Two guesses who's better at playing the game within whatever rules have been devised? Hint: It's not now, never was, and never will be the tax man.

I can almost feel the hate from here, but I'm not condoning or condemning the players or game, I'm just explaining how it works in reality rather than intent. There's no moral or spiritual component to taxation, there's only a balance due created by applying a rule set. It is what it is.

Re: Beware of False Profits

The point of this digital revenue tax is that it'll be the revenue inside the EU that will be taxable at 3%, *not* profit, regardless of whether it slips into a Double Dutch Irish sandwich or not.

Ok, so lets say I have revenue of £100M. You now take £3M in envy tax.

The other £97M gets taxed at 20% on the profit part. Ok, but if your complaint stems from my not having made enough profit to pay you the Corp Tax you think you deserve, then I'll be making zero profit or less using the new system. Most of the tech giants have an operating profit margin in the UK & EU of close to or less than the proposed envy tax.

Thus, what you have achieved is at best, that I pay you 3% evny tax to operate here, when I'm already probably paying something similar anyway via Corporation Taxes. You've moved the money from one pot, to another, but not increased your £s taken.

However, this is where things take a turn for the worse for you. If your envy tax pushes me into making a loss for Corp Tax, I can roll that over for many years. A little legal entity restructuring and I can spin off the corp tax loss into its own vehicle and sell that vehicle from my offshore parent company to someone else who wants to operate here, thus regaining some of my envy taxes while you then lose out on somone elses CT.

Corporate taxation is an internationally competetive market place. It's not quite winne rtakes all, but its close enough to that to mean that if you want a share of the international CT, you are going to have to compete to get it. That'll not be popular, but then, the real world isn't about being popular.

Me/you being substitiutes for a FAANGM style operation and the tax man respectively.

This is my specialist area of IT, but I'm an IT specialist not a tax specialist, and even I can see mile wide roads down which to travel that don't lead to a cent/penny more in taxes becoming due.

If Britain lowered tax to attract Apple it would have to apply the same tax rates to Rolls-Royce, HSBC, ICI, Shell, etc etc

All of whom already engage in some level of tax planning. Don't assume that because the rate payable is reduced that the amount garnered would also fall. All economic evidence points to the contrary.

Re: Beware of False Profits

The problem isn't inherently the double-Dutch-Irish-malarkey, it's companies using that to shift profits to a lower-tax jurisdiction.

There's just so very many ways to achieve this, and so many companies doing it, that to focus only on the tech giants is to really misunderstand the scale of the industry.

More than that, the whole Irish double Dutch sandwich with extra ketchup bullshit won't apply any more.

Sure it will.

I realise lots of people really don't like the "Irish double Dutch sandwich with extra ketchup bullshit" strategy, but there's no reason at all why this won't work afterwards. Arguably, it'll work even better than it does now.

The only difference is that we could substitute ourselves for any part of that arrangement, knocking Ireland or Holland out of contention. Or both, if we chose. I'm not suggesting we should, simply explainin that we could.

I'm pretty sure that UK will act unilaterally about this pretty soon. Once they're out of the EU, there's no reason for them not to tax the UK profits of EU companies, is there?

Assuming we ever actually get "out of the EU", then the rEU become our competition for tax revenues. There's nothing to stop us attracting their companies here by ensuring our rate of Corporation Tax is lower than theirs, thus getting a slightly smaller slice of a much larger pie. In essence, lowering the rate in order to increase the revenue extracted.

...only recently Git understood you may need to have different branches of a repo at the same time on your local disk, and their solution is still a just workaround.

No surprise those who happily drink the kool-aid of the "greatest tool of all times" then incur in this kind of issues.

I use git in preference to all other version control systems. It's pretty damn far from perfect, but on reflection, I hate it less than all other version control systems.

Stupid or lazy developers will always be a problem for as long as the entry requirement to our industry is being able to write the word developer on your CV.

Re: Right to be forgotten

In some ways, it is unfair for a conviction to follow people forever, where the courts have stated a limit. Assuming ABC is not convicted with a life sentence, his conviction will be "spent" after a certain period. If old reports are damaging people beyond that period, I have some sympathy.

Save your sympathy for his victims. Criminals are both self selecting and stupid enough to get caught.

I'm all in favour of letting criminals hide their past misdeeds just as soon as society invents a way to remove all adverse affects from the victims first. If society continues to punish someone with a discoverable but otherwise spent conviction, then society has declared that the punishment levied by the courts was insufficient.

I'd be quite happy to do business with someone with a conviction for say weed posession, or drunk & disorderly in their youth. I'd not be happy to do business with a fraudster or violent criminal - if you are dishonest or can't control your base impulses then you're a disaster waiting to happen, and I'd rather not foot the bill when you do.

How many people have jobs that have little or nothing to do with their school and university qualifications?

Every job I've ever held, despite the fact that I earned 2 degrees. Since HR started having degrees, there's been an explosion in the number of jobs requiring a degree to get, that don't need a degree to do.

Re: Who is ultimately responsible? well you are of course, you voted for them

But, however crappy our particular constituency MP behaves, we'll still vote for him (or abstain), lest the other lot get in.

Not me. Floating voter right here. You earn my vote, and if you happen to be in government at the time, then the actions of your government become an equal concern in whether I continue to vote for you or someone else.

I was once a proud labour voter, but then they wrecked the economy, started so many wars, and opened the door to unfettered immigation [1]. Now they're compounding that by becoming institutionally racist..... perhaps they always were, but I didn't believe it when I voted for them.

These days I vote Conservative, but given the surrender to the rEU in Brexit negotiations (remainer/leaver, who of you really thinks they've done a good job here? Yeah, me neither), I'm going to struggle to vote for them next year when we doubtlessly have another election.

All I really want is a party that understands fiscal discipline and the need for reform of eternal institutions in the public sector (reform does not mean abondonment or destruction, it is simply the process by which the inevitable inefficiency that creeps in over time or gets produced by technological advances gets dealt with rather than ignored). It shouldn't be too much to ask, but it is.

1 - Ostensibly to annoy Conservatives, but without any regard for the economic impact on their Northern voters or what it would do to British society and peoples relationship with the rEU. I think immigration can be a positive good for society if it is well managed and of paramount importance, tightly coupled to integration. Our economy is basically shot without it.

Re: before you can apply an index to a table.

People don't write nested selects and correlated sub queries just for fun.

In my experience people usually do it due to a lack of talent. Though in fairness, I've also seen the reasons you give.

Re: before you can apply an index to a table.

And when you do, the flippin' developers write nested selects that invalidate the index and force brute-force table-walks anyway.

And then they complain that "the database is slow".

Why aren't the developers writing their own index?

As a dev, I usually do the database design and tuning, not the dba. I've worked for about 9 companies now and never worked in one where the dba did the performance tuning. After all, I know what the code is going to do, so I know what variable range the sprocs will be passed and also what compound conidtionals I'm going to want to find with non-clustered indexes etc.

Re: Too one-sided

Best thing to do is refuse to submit to having your prints taken on the street.

No it isn't.

If the police officer has sufficient grounds to believe that you have committed a crime, they should arrest you so that you get a free lawyer and start the clock ticking.

Unfortunately being arrested, whether or not you are subsequently charged, has real life consequences. One of which is inelligibility for omse possibly important visa waiver schemes, such as the one for the USA.

I have to travel there for work periodically, and have had to do so for numerous prior employers, so need the waiver scheme for my work. Lots of places presume you haven't committed genocide, and there's so few people with HIV/AIDS and so many people with a criminal record, that elligibility for the scheme (which employers are entitled to enquire about) is used as a proxy for "Do you have a criminal conviction that is timed out under ROA?".

Don't shoot the messenger over this please, but what is, is. It's not my idea and its not something I influence.

If they don't have sufficient grounds to believe that you have committed a crime they should be leaving you alone rather than carrying out speculative identity checks on people who happen to be in a particular area on the grounds that there are bound to be one or two illegals amongst the hundreds checked.

This will probably mostly be used to verify that drivers stopped while commiting offences are who they say they are, and not the person insured on the car. No verifiable ID, then please put a hand on this device Sir.

I would expect there to be fewer applications of the tech for all other use cases, once it goes live.

Or maybe wet your finger with a plastic solvent before pressing it against the officer's scanner.

And risk going from being an innocent suspect who could have cleared themselves effortlessly in a second, to someone possibly guilty of criminal damage? Sorry, but I'm not sure you've thought this through.

Re: It's happening...

Some chromebooks costs a couple of hundred quid, some cost a grand so hardware will be variable and I wonder if Windows will only support a minimum spec so only the more expensive chromebooks will have it as an option.

They're pretty much going to have too. The 8gb Surface Go costs just over 500 notes, despite the availability of an equivalently specced Chromebook for 300. That's a pretty big different - even if the Chromebook lasts half as long as the Surface (and I know of no reason why it should), you'd be better off with a Chromebook as the 2nd upgrade would be 'free'.

I say this as a lifelong MS dev......

It's no good MS looking at Macbook prices and using them to set the cost of a Surface - 3 or 4 years from now I can flog a Macbook for almost half what I paid for it, the 2nd hand Surface won't run anything like that level of residual value.

Re: Where To??

I'm sure Reno would be happy to take away some of LV's biz.

Having visited Reno once, before my many trips to Vegas, they might as well relocate to Blackpool as Reno.

The first motel we (group of guys travelling) tried to rent a room at had the front desk guy literally sitting in a jail cell - to prevent visitors accosting him. Hugely entertaining, and Reno is a fun place, but it pales in comparisson to Vegas. Sorry Reno - I'll always remember you fondly, but I'll probably not be back.

Re: Curiously American @AC

I did have a job, where I booked my holiday 3 times, had it cancelled by the company 3 times, due to project demands, then a memo mid November that all holiday had to be taken by the end of the year.

Had a similar thing happen 10 years ago. My answer was to stop working Mondays from September.

Amazingly, the following year, after again cancelling most of my summer leave, they found a way to magically roll it over. Then when I quit the third time they canned my summer vacations, they found a way to pay me for it, rather than have me resign and go on "holiday" at the end of the day......

Re: Sounds about right

"Infosec", if that's a dedicated job, has to be the most thankless job in any organisation.

Toilet cleaner. You literally cover their to-do list with shit on a daily basis. And yet, if the CEO disappears for a month the business runs fine, whereas if the bog cleaner goes AWOL, you'll be lucky to get through a day or two.....

Re: Self-medicating with booze is no answer

How about coffee?

I just got mug number 7, so I'm all set thanks!

I'm not actually sure coffee is considered all that bad for you these days. Every time I look the medical advice seems to have changed anyway. Whereas, copious quantities of sweet sweet booze are well understood to be bad for your health.

Re: Duh!

I wonder how many engineers said, "Excuse me but ....." and were then shouted down or ignored.

They won't have been shouted down and they won't have been ignored: They will have been "resisitant to change", which is all too often management speak for "This employee is smarter than me and has exposed the utter idiocy of my bonus bagging idea".

Quite why "society" values those whose main skill is watching others work at a value premium to those doing the work, is beyond me. I mean, sure, if the management add value, but as often as not, that isn't the case.