Posts by Doctor Syntax 40413 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
It's not so much what they understand what contractors currently do for them. It's what they want them to do for them in a couple of weeks' time: vote. And the reason it's become an issue not is the realisation that over the last few years there's been a democratic shift towards all sorts of forms of non-standard (in tax terms) employment so that means more votes to lie grub for than in the past.
"it has been forced to pay it all as salary."
The official line isn't "forced", it's "deemed". A weasel word if ever there was one.
Add being between contracts onto the list of what the company should be making provision for. One of the things clients usually want is instant availability. That's an expensive attribute to provide. The freelancer who's available on Monday when called on Friday has probably been "available" for some time, otherwise the agent is trying to fish in a very small pool.
"When IR35 was first mooted, and increasingly as it has morphed into what we have today, the premise was that the 'companies' and 'small businesses' were really not companies at all, but a vehicle to be employed by a company with some significant financial benefits. So they introduced the term 'disguised employees' and then deemed that their Personal Service Company (PSC) was not really a business at all, so did not fall into the category of either businesses or companies, and thus are not in scope for his statement."
This doesn't seem to have changed as far as Labour is concerned. The only morphing here is that the Conservatives have ceased to be the party for small businesses. And can we please avoid the term PSC. The individual freelancer's company, as you go on to say, is just a smaller version of the bigger outsourcing companies although probably better motivated to do a better job. The correct terms should be "Small Outsourcing Company".
"In addition, for tax purposes, self-employed and employed by a PSC are completely different things, even now. So they can very easily claim that they are supporting the self-employed while taxing the hell out of a PSC."
Limited company freelancing only came into existence (AFAIK - it was before my time) because the IR as it then was came down on the nearest limited company in the chain if a self-employed person defaulted. I don't know if this was a frequent occurrence or FUD but it seems that HMRC have finally worked themselves into the same position again.
One of the central problems here is that tax rules are drawn up by people on salaries with incremental scales and reasonably secure employment and don't really understand that any other way of working exists and is essential for the economy.
It depends on various factors such as the attitude of HMRC and the phase of the moon. The contract and working conditions may have some minor influence but the attitude of HMRC will be that you're caught anyway.
Serious answer - get the contract reviewed by a competent reviewer along with as much additional documentation you can get your hands on about the nature of the engagement. Look like an independent company. Don't use the company account as a pipe-line to direct cash straight from Apple to you, either as salary or dividends. Pay yourself a reasonable salary whilst making provision to be able to keep paying after the engagement's ended. When a pimp agent rings up after you've finished the first question will be "Are you available?" and providing that availability will have cost your company money by continuing to pay salary whilst you're on the bench.
According to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50547793 Labour plan to end bogus self-employment" so maybe that's how they plan to abolish IR35. You will be directly employed irrespective of whether you or your employer want that to be the case.
Not that I believe any of it. This has been the worst election for unfulfillable promises that I can remember - and that includes N Irish elections as well as UK.
"would you have been OK with that being put on the notice board?"
If he wasn't he could have removed it. In this case the person responsible didn't do anything about it. In fact it was eventually the guy who was fired who actually did the right thing by putting it into confidential waste when it hadn't been collected. Reading the judgement it also appears that he did the right thing on finding it, namely putting it in a place where it was common to leave uncollected print-out.
"Ah, but if everyone keeps quiet, how do you know your deal is special or not ?"
Everyone anonymously writes a figure on a piece of paper, not specifically their salary, and puts it into a pile. Everyone is told what all the pieces of paper say. Nobody knows who wrote what but all of them know what their salary is and if the figures reflect salaries they know how special they are.
Of course people might lie, leading to more dissension. Manglement might then conclude that openness might have its advantages.
It's difficult to see how they could have made more determined efforts to fail.
Initial carelessness in either printing it out unaware (a possible explanation for not collecting it) or failing to collect a deliberate print out.
Taking umbrage that something left in plain sight had been remarked on.
Not expecting it to be discussed.
Taming more umbrage when it was.
Picking on one employee.
Not being able to conduct disciplinary proceedings to a standard that would keep them out of court (probably an impossibility anyway in the circumstances but they seem to have made outstanding efforts in this regard).
Not settling ensuring that they did end up in court going full Streisand.
“Although .org has often been thought of as a ‘home of non-profits,’ the domain was not actually defined that way,” he wrote, citing IETF document RFC 1591 from 1994.
He should have been more careful what he quoted. That RFC also says "It is extremely unlikely that any other TLDs will be created."
We still have a huge - about 5' high, 6' wide - very solid and heavy oak book case we bought at auction soon after we were married. We were only in a second floor flat, not fourth but the stair case had two flights and two landings per floor so it was a tight fit and did I say it was heavy. It's amazing what a few young students can do when they put their minds to it although it still has a scrape of paint from the staircase wall.
In the early days of commercial computers David Brown Tractors got one, probably an Elliot. It was too heavy for the lift but they arranged to haul it up the lift shaft. It broke free from its rope and fell. The bloke who'd tied it on fainted. It must have been a family trait, his daughter was in my class at school and at the mention of the word "blood" keeled over off her lab-stool.
"The people working on it are still mostly in the USA"
The point that Rich 2 was making was the wider one about open source projects in general. People contribute to open source from all over the world. It would be very difficult for the likes of Trump to split out contributions from US citizens. It would, however, be somewhat easier to lean on any US-based infrastructure including foundations that support projects. Not that it would make too much difference - the projects themselves would be out from under as quickly as you can say "fork".
"Of course anyone involved can explain the niceties of Swiss incorporation and international jurisdiction to the SWAT team coming through their door."
Alternatively they can just leave a note for the SWAT team that they've upped sticks and gone. Oh, I forgot, US citizenship doesn't include the right to travel does it? It's like the middle ages in Europe - you have to get permission from the lord of the manor to move elsewhere.
"I've said before that I don't understand why so many open source projects are incorporated in the US."
A lot aren't physically in any particular place unless you count a Github server and maybe it's time to rethink that in favour of one hosted by a business outside the US. Some are in Germany including NextCloud , KDE and the Document Foundaton. AIUI German law has advantages for registering such organisations. Dyne.org who support Devuan is in the Netherlands and the devuan.org domain is registered in Italy.
If I were an HP stock holder I'd be thinking that most of the money I'd get would be borrowed. If I also got stock I'd be holding a chunk of that debt. In other words I'd effectively have borrowed the money to pay myself and have to pay interest on it. No way would I want stock.
OTOH if I were a Xerox stock holder I'd be thinking if it were an all cash deal I'd be borrowing heavily to buy a chunk of HP shares - but if I wanted to do that I'd just go out and buy them myself. But Xerox has money from the Fujifilm deal; instead of borrowing more money to no good purpose why don't they just hand me my share of the cash in hand?
"But just think we still take over a year to become slightly self-aware"
My recollection is that babies start out self-aware but aware of nothing else. They certainly know when they want something and able to let you know but the second part is probably pre-programmed That year's spent becoming aware of the environment they're in, correlating the inputs from the different senses. They learn to understand what they see has other properties by touching it, trying to eat it etc. That understanding of the external world is crucial.
"AI has no real understanding of what it is doing"
This is the key. We need to understand what "understanding" is.
As regards the example of whether an AI could recognise a sheep when it's not standing on grass, we all understand that a seep isn't just some generalisation of a collection of images, it's an object with a whole collection of other characteristics including its behaviour. Understanding is quite a complex phenomenon. Again in relation to sheep, the grandkids could at an early age quite easily connect Shaun with the real sheep they see in the fields around here and yet recognise the human characteristics added by animators as being artificial and find the humour. Good luck to getting an AI system to do that.
IIRC DECNet relied on - or assumed - that the MAC addresses were the subset allocated to DEC. Trying to get HP-UX boxes talking to a VAX with a VAX-oriented management we had to buy a DECNet package for HP-UX. When it was installed it promptly changed the MAC (which was programmable) to look like DEC. That confused all the clients until their caches caught up.
"I am confident in our ability to drive sustainable, profitable growth as we continue to shift our portfolio to higher-value, software-defined solutions and execute our pivot to offering everything as a service by 2022, Our strategy to deliver an edge-to-cloud platform-as-a -service is unmatched in the industry."
Maybe Xerox are trying to provoke HP into making a counter-bid against them. Given that they're the smaller of the two it would make more sense and presumably result in less debt. But I'd have thought that if combining the two was really a good idea a straight merger make most sense. No additional debt, just a question of which CEO gets fired the big pay-off as there'll then only be one.
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