Posts by Mark 65 3439 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
In most companies the largest bill, after cost of goods, is wages. Those come with a massive tax take.
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Third is often pensions. You got it - taxed!
Apple does most of the manufacturing in China as stated in the article. Often under contract. These people may or may not be paid well compared to other companies but by Western standards it will be fuck all. That is what makes the margin so large. Employing countless knowledgeless meat-sacks poncing around stores asking if they can help you then knowing jack-shit about the product line is not likely to produce a massive tax take. Going by what I have seen plenty will be students and hence pay little or no tax based on income and thresholds. There will be some payroll taxes but nothing compared to what gets avoided.
Most corporations - like most individuals - pay a third to a half of their income in tax.
Companies like Apple and Google make huge profits compared with their staffing levels and have averaged/harmonised corporation tax rates below 15%. I sincerely doubt that payroll tax is going to take them up to 33% let alone 50%. That statement is simply nonsense. Small businesses and those unable to profit shift certainly do pay higher rates and get properly screwed.
All taxes are paid by the buyer...am I the only person who understands this?
And the shareholders no? I mean, how much you can pass on to the buyer depends on the competitiveness of the market in which you operate. If it is highly competitive then more "cost" is born by the shareholders.
Turnover cannot work as it'll just fuck over low margin businesses. It always seems like a good quick fix but it just doesn't work. You need to tax profits. It's just that, at the present time, we have a rather large problem with their definition.
My issue is that for all this transfer pricing to be legal it has to be arms-length does it not? It sure doesn't seem arms length but a major planned and smoothly run operation to me.
@DaveDaveDave: I've always viewed minimum wage as a guilt payment by the Government to those they've fucked over. Whether that be through open borders driving down wages at the bottom or a lack of genuine training opportunities and/or a shit education system that teaches to the test rather than providing people with the skills to get on in life. Of course their (all Governments) failure to deal with real price inflation plays a part too by allowing costs to soar. That failure may take the form of blowing bubbles (no M Jackson jokes please) in housing to general failure to invest in critical infrastructure which leaves the country importing ever more energy from overseas. Like I said - it is a guilt payment.
The problem is that although you remove the income tax you need to up the VAT/consumption/transaction rate to avoid losing "Government income" or "other people's money" as I prefer to refer to it. This seems good at first until you realise that at the point at which the workers retire you've likely made everyone poorer in their final years as they weren't paying income tax before but now they're getting striped by your new taxes. Can't see you ever getting that one off the ground especially seeing as they've already had the parasites in fund management clipping the ticket on their money pot for the last 40+ years.
I certainly agree that it makes no sense to say "here you go son, here's a minimum wage to stop you getting fucked over" one moment before adding "and now hand over the tax man's take". Still, the whole realm of Government revolves around clipping the ticket and getting in the bloody way of everything.
I like the idea Tim but, correct me if I'm wrong, doesn't it still require that we have sorted out the profit shifting that goes on? I mean, you could create the most equitable efficient system going but if you can profit shift then they will all still be at it moving profits to the race-to-the-bottom tax locale de jeur. If it does require that the profit shifting issue is solved then, once that is achieved, who would give a shit about changing the system?
Never ceases to amaze me the number of "successful" people who spout shit about their success being down to getting up early, yoga, diet, or some other shit when in the end the biggest part is chance or simple plain old good luck. Nicholas Nasim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness should be compulsory reading for these people before they start on the sermon circuit.
Those will be the plans you see today. There are plenty of people out there that would have connected with Telstra and never moved house. As such they would be on a shitty plan that includes lovely per MB data charges. Up until recently I knew people that still had such plans - Telstra won't prompt you to update - until I got them to switch.
Sudden changes in personal circumstances? Errr, go read the companies house filings for his futures business - they've already been posted on the internet. I believe someone has already looked into it at noted that on the years where losses were reported they arose due to large unexplained withdrawals from the company. There's also apparently a company setup in a shadier tax realm with "Market Milking" in its name. I'm not so sure that living in Hounslow flies under the radar given the filings already made to the authorities.
It's not borderline immoral, it is immoral... The amount of electrical waste we create is high enough already without manufacturers adding to it by shortening their lifespan and making them unserviceable even by themselves.
I thought there was some EU mandate somewhere that stated the minimum level of recycle-ability of products? Or is that the problem, it is highly recycle-able - you just need to do it for any single component failure?
But then, if that really is the case, this is then an interesting statement...
Remote shortcomings aside, the Mobi Pro is a seriously useful piece of kit that should speed up the workflow of any photographer, particularly those producing a lot of studio-based work
It simply will not speed up the workflow. Macs and most laptops have SD card slots and USB3 capable readers should be readily available. These should all be far quicker than wi-fi from a little card. Removing a card and placing it in a reader to transfer the contents whilst a replacement card is then in the camera for continued shooting is more practical. Anyone doing proper studio work will likely do a tethered shoot or use their camera's wi-fi capability, whether that is in-body or via a hot-shoe accessory for techno-laggards like Canon.
iPads and tablets can generally be used to do stuff, but that stuff is mainly email and browse. At home I still gravitate back to the desktop for most things. Photo processing - yep, video - yep, spreadsheet - yep, most things - yep. It's the fact it has a big screen, craploads of storage, a mouse, a keyboard (both of which are highly accurate) and is incredibly fast.
I don't shop on a tablet and most sites are still crap to use in this regard and password managers are a pain in the arse. I have much more faith in my PC with firefox, adblock, betterprivacy, lastpass etc added in.
I read emails on it, maybe do some light browsing, and maybe look through photos I have been arsed to sync to it. Used to use it for movies when flying. The kids get much more use out of it these days. Some apps are useful but given most will be on my PC I'm not keen on paying twice.
Apple deprecates code faster than most people change their underwear, so old applications either adapt or die. If MS had allowed legacy x86 cruft to run on ARMs or Itanics [sic], perhaps the x86 would have sunk to it's most richly deserved place on the bottom of the ocean.
One key point is that MS is used in the enterprise and big organisations will not tolerate "everything breaks from version 1 to version 2 so best upgrade all your apps". Apple operates mainly in the consumer space where you can just tell people to suck it up.
Although it may go against international trends to split out functionality from the ACCC it will likely benefit the taxpayer in the long run from perhaps having someone who will prosecute people rather than an organisation that cannot see a problem with petrol prices changing independently of the wholesale fuel cost and in and around holiday periods or that there's a problem with Woolies and Coles representing around 80% of the grocery market. Frankly the current bunch under SIms are as useful as tits on a boar.
You are mistaken T.F.M., the device is there purely for the potential future abuse scenarios. That there may be some benefit in a small set of circumstances is merely the current sales pitch to the masses. This will be abused, first by insurance companies (who are no doubt ready to go with it as are the TLAs) then by the local council investigating some dog shitting issue or other nonsense. It is just a matter of when not if. The data will exist, so why not?
I don't think it will be engineered very deeply otherwise they then either have to export the useless technology to markets where it is of zero use because they don't have the system or they need to maintain even more inter-market differentiations of the vehicle componentry - something that for cost/margin purposes they typically don't want to do. My guess is that it will be bolt on at best - they are legally obliged to provide it but frankly couldn't give a shit if you remove it.
Indeed I have always considered Rolex to be like the BMW of luxury watches. They market their brand in a shouty look-at-me fashion and that attracts a similar minded customer. Not to mention if it is an aphrodisiac as implied by Mr Worstall it will also attract a certain type of mate - generally the more paddling-pool shallow rattly-headed type. The likes of your real luxury watch - Patek, Vacheron, Audemars etc - would, as previously stated, not even be noticed by such types but would be admired in the right circles and be handed down as heirlooms. Doesn't one of them advertise that you don't so much own their watch but merely look after it for the next generation? Personally I just use them to tell the time so couldn't give a shit.
Yeah, because in a theoretical future where even just 25% of workstations run (say, Linux), the NSA will just go "Oh well, we had a good run" and give up.
True, but given the Windows centric bent of those module listings I'd be happier to make more work for them than offer it up on a plate.
To anyone who says "Why would they be interested in you?" I offer "Who knows who they are interested in, it seems like they want to tap everything everywhere?". Mass surveillance is, after all, designed to prevent you getting any big ideas on non-conformity.
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