Posts by Doctor Syntax 40557 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Inevitably that cannot work for everyone, since then there would be no money coming in to pay us"
The recent article on this was predicated on the assumption that automation would give rise to mass unemployment.* The proposal there was to tax the work of the robots. This in itself might not be sufficient as the work could be off-shored to somewhere with lower tax rates. It would take more than simply taxing robotics but there could still be means to levy the necessary taxes. In those specific circumstances one could see how it might work.
*AFAIK mass unemployment in the past has been a result of economic meddling rather then mechanisation but I suppose there's always a first time.
"If you did an FOI of your local authority to ask them how much money is spent on emergency accommodation, I think you'd be in for a shock."
OTOH some of the locals have a shock when I point out how much the local authority, which is perpetually crying poverty, spent on financing a leg of the Tour de France in England.
"A similar idea is negative income tax. If you earn less than the tax threshold they pay you to bring it up to that. Probably easier to administer than UBI."
Maybe you're thinking of PAYE and a low-paid job. In the case of Edward making and selling stuff there wouldn't be an employer running PAYE.
But the killer in this idea is that it would involve HMRC. HMRC would ensure administration could never be simple.
"I have a copy of Tommy by the Who, which was a two LP set, which had sides 1 and 4 on one disk, and 2 and 3 on the other."
That was common with opera recordings which could very easily run to multiple disks. On long pieces it wasn't always possible to get the turnover right. The CBS Bruno Walter LP of Mahler 1 had a turnover in the middle of the long 3rd movement. It was a relief to move on to CD where that wasn't necessary. Then they came out with a multi disk, multi symphony set where they split one symphony between 2 CDs.
A few days ago my bank send out an email about this. Or, strictly speaking, they didn't. They had a marketing company spammer send it out with a From: line purporting to be the bank, naturally a noreply address.
So I have an email purporting to be from the bank but originating from an IP address not owned by the bank. Look like a phishing email much?
And it gets worse. There are several links in the email which appear to point to the bank's domain. However when I look up the address of the sub-domain server for these links (the same subdomain used for the From: address) it's not in the bank's block. It belongs to the same spamming business that sent the email. Look like a phishing email supported by a bit of DNS poisoning much?
The only indication that it's probably from the bank is the address to which it was sent. It's one that's provided only for the bank.
Instead of training customers to be aware of scams, the overt purpose of the email, it's actually training them to be phished.
And I wonder if their IT security manager, assuming they have such a thing, is happy to have a subdomain resolve to a server not controlled by the bank. If I were in that position I'd be livid.
"For example, its hard to argue that Gmail is one of the better email server implementations, but I can not get a private account"
You can get a private account by going to a provider who specialises in running paid-for mail services as their business and it will cost you a lot less than $1,000,000 pa. Don't forget, with Google you're the product and it you're the product it's hard to argue that it's even a good implementation let alone one of the better.
"Why did this ever need to be a cloud based service anyway?"
For a lot of use cases I don't see the point. The common point of contact is the user. User has portable device and base computer, records data on portable device whilst away from base, has no access to base computer at that time & hence doesn't need it synced at that time. user returns to base with portable device and only now can use base computer but portable and base are now within BT/LAN/USB cable distance and can be synced.
The use cases I can see this making sense are non-portable work and home computers (but even then a portable device can intermediate) or needing a backup for the portable device whilst still away from base. This last sounds like something a journalist could need but wouldn't it require encryption whilst in transit at the very least?
Good question.
Firstly AFAIK Evernote is Freemium which always raises the possibility of "you're the product" whereas the sites I'm thinking of are essentially paid for hosting sites which is a very different business model. Secondly there's a choice of several EU countries plus Switzerland which provide very different legislative environments to the US - and data protection in the EU is due to get stronger still in 2018. Thirdly https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/9.0/user_manual/files/encrypting_files.html
"There are open source alternatives you can host for yourself, but setting this up is beyond the skillset of the average user."
Presumably you're thinking in terms of Owncloud/Nextcloud. There are a number of businesses which will host a service for you so you don't need to set one up yourself. You can take your pick of whatever you think is the country with the best attitude to privacy.
"The second is that the decision maker has to believe that they had the original idea. You learn to let them take the credit as a way to get something done."
There's also the issue of how much the advice costs. Suggestion by line-worker, volunteer or whatever, much less than manager receiving it is paid so it can't be worth very much. Same advice relayed from same source via consultant or from an expensive conference, clearly very valuable. Yes, the manager clearly knows the price of everything and the value of nothing but in such cases adding to the price effectively adds to the value.
"The company suddenly realise that they are making a loss on an item and it goes out of stock and they refuse to honour existing orders even if the purchaser has all the correct paperwork...Amazingly, it comes back in stock at the store and at the same or higher price than elsewhere."
In that case there's no reason not to honour it or take to trip to the Small Claims Court.
"to say nothing of Flickr, Yahoo! IM, and the hundreds of millions of webmail users who hadn't logged in for years, and you begin to see the scope of the engineering challenge."
There seems to be a general acknowledgement that the number of real user accounts is less than the number of stated user accounts. Presumably the latter contributes to the stock market valuation. Isn't this something TPTB (?SEC) should take an interest in?
[robots] that replace people, whose income is taxed – can themselves be taxed, so that governments can redistribute the money to its unemployed citizens, thus giving them a basic income...
First of all, businesses don't exist to pay tax, it being just another expense. They will twist and turn to avoid it, basing themselves in the Seychelles, the Cayman Isles, Panama and any other nation-state where such onerous and unwanted taxes are not raised."
Where the person being replaced is being replaced outside of the country it doesn't really matter whether it's a robot or an outsourced human worker doing the replacement from the tax point of view. For some tasks external replacement wouldn't be possible anyway - the robot barista vending machine needs to be in reach of the customer. If its work is to be taxed it can be taxed at its location.
But the line of argument in the article seems to assume corporation tax. Where multinationals are concerned corporation tax always favours small countries with a small local tax base. They can attract what are effectively accommodation addresses by offering competitive tax rates that bring in much greater receipts than could be achieved by the most swingeing rates on local businesses - and the local businesses then have the additional advantages of paying low rates themselves.
If corporation tax is failing the objectives of most countries then maybe the time has come to look at an alternative or at least a partial replacement. Tax all money, credit or other proxy for money, leaving the country. That way it gets taxed before it reaches the tax haven. It also replaces import duties as the money leaving the country to pay for the imports is what gets taxed.
"it was bought out then shut down by some myopic fools in the late 90s who claimed printed computer mags were old hat and online was the way forward"
By that time it had long been a shadow of its former self. Originally it was largely written by people who were developing the stuff or pioneering new uses. I remember one article written by Woz.
Eventually it became more or less straight journalistic rehashes of handouts, "discussions" produced by copying and pasting extracts from a series of separate interviews with/statements by the "participants" and such like. It had lost its authentic voice.
"As a born and bred country bumpkin, still resident in my ancestral village, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to snaffle up the pure unadulterated air of yore"
Would that "air of yore" be the the coal smoke that followed on from the introduction of the railways? Because before that it was all wood fires unless you had turbary rights.
BTW I too live in my native village. I quite like the wood smoke from my neighbour's wood-burner.
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