I would imagine the money to reimburse the poor would come from the sales tax itself. ============= Well, take the UK, so its all in GBP 1.1 Trillion borrowing. 5.3 trillion off the books debts. Primarily pensions, and just for the pensions where people have paid up front, (not pensions resulting from future payments), or pensions associated with people who have worked for the government - deferred pay. The rest is PFI, which is debt deliberately maniplated off the books. Plus expected losses on guarantees, and nuclear decommissiong where the companies paid up front, for the government to undertake the work. About 7 trillion in total. Taxes at 550 bn a year. 0.55 trillion. Government spending at 0.7 trillion The current position is unsusbtainable. They are bust. So whose is going to lose. 1. People dependent on the state. That's the poor, who receive redistributions of money, primarily because they are taxed too much to live off what they are allowed to keep. 2. People forced to save with the state for their pensions. That's ex state workers, and the poor again. They haven't enough to live off, yet they are still taxed for that pension. It pays out about 20% of the value of payments. The rest has been redistributed, or spent on other things. Since that's a pretty unpleasant cocktail, the state will try and tax its way out. That won't work. The UK has lost 10,000 out of the 16,000 million a year earners in one year. France is haemoraging the wealthy because it said, we will tax you at 75% on income, then welfare on the rest, and a wealth tax to boot. Remember, the EU says freedom of movement of people, goods, services and capital. You would have to derogate from the treaties to prevent capital flight. ie. The politicians of the country would have to say, we won't allow you to leave unless you hand over your money. It can be done legally, but it reeks of the third reich.

Trust A owns company B, registered in country C, Trust pays income to a person in country D. D can get the tax on the income. However D cannot tax the trust, because its not in the county. Neither can it tax B, the company for the same reason. It can't tax the person for the ownership of the shares, because they don't own the shares, the trust does. You might as well ask how can North Korea tax Apple for their profits in the USA.

Shares where? UK can tax UK shares. UK can't tax non uk companies So what happens when the company pays a dividend equal to the spending of the rich person. They pay tax on the dividend, which is their spending after tax. End result, they don't get taxed on their entire earnings, because the earnings are the companies. Now I can see your response. Ah, we tax share ownership. We make it penal to own shares. Not without considerable side effects, but the rich just put the ownship into trust, and its game over. That's the way the game has been played and will be played more and more. So countries are going to have to resort to taxing consumption, and non-tradeable goods. However, that won't substain current spending, or service the debts. So its defaults. How can the poor be reimbursed when they don't have the money to re-imburse them? Ah they can print it. Perhaps that's the plan. The problem is that the off the book debts that the poor are so dependent on, welfare and pensions, are inflation linked. You can't print your way out of inflation linked debt. So its going to be default, and that hits the poor. It's pretty dire, but the root cause is states running a Ponzi, rather than the people paying 50% plus of their income and then being denied services.

Quite. The UK used to have 16,000 people with a million plus (GBP) incomes. Tax went to over 50%. Now there are only 6,000. Wonder what the 10,000 have done.

So they have facebook.us and move all the accounts there. You can, if you want, remove yourself. Now what's France going to do? Is it going to put up a firewall and say to the French, you can't have access to Facebook? That's what you have to get around. [The French really don't get the tax thing. Search for Depardieu and his comments. I'll re-iterate. 44 bn left France last month. Bankruptcies are rife. They have real problems. It's all legal. The French would need to get all EU countries to agree to it, or they would have to leave the EU. Remember, Freedom of movement of people, goods, services and capital. It's the law.

It's both. You can't remove the motivation from the tax. The motivation is, we're desperate for money, primarily because they've been cooking the books. Pensions debts aren't recorded. Service taxes can always be avoided. I can buy from wherever I want in the EU. I can buy an MP3 from the USA if I want. It doesn't matter where I buy, location doesn't matter for these sorts of services. Quality doesn't change. So its just down to price. Phone bill - depends on local infrastructure, either fixed line or mobile. That can be taxed. Cable bill - ditto Water bill ditto. Software? Nope. MP3? nope. Web services? Nope. You're confusing goods which are what the economists call non-tradeable with goods and services that are. So going forward you're going to see taxes on the non-tradeable goods. Stuff that depends on infrastructure that's fixed, or things like property (mobile homes exempted), restuarants, that can't be moved. Likewise with the rich. They will move their assets, put them into companies, and you can only tax where the company is, not where the shareholders are. You can certainly tax the income part, but the rest you can't. So the rich will just pay themselves what they spend. ie. You only get taxed on spending. It's a trend and its happening. Taxes will move to consumption taxes. Taxes on capital, and taxes on income won't be effective. Now taxes on consumption hit the poor, and since the states can't support their current set up on current taxes, let alone their debts. its going to be very rough.

So you move your servers to where tax is lowest. Then you pay the appropriate tax in that country. Now what?

The asset is the willingness of French Advertisers to use Facebook, Google etc. They can't tax Facebook, because its all offshore. So the French are going to have to tax the Advertisers that use Google, Facebook etc. Hmmm, not going to go down well is it, taxing your own companies. Neither is taxes the ultimate consumer, the man or woman, dans la Rue. Ah well, that's what comes from running a Ponzi scam. At some point you get desperate for cash to keep it rolling over, then it goes tits up.

There's an interesting change going on. Services, which are basically delivered electronically, can't be taxed. Similarly with lots of IP. Think about it. Who are you going to tax? The consumer, or the producer. Ah, the producer say government. There aren't many of them, so we can get them. Difficult going after the consumer, since they are the ones who vote. Ah, slight problem. We can't go after the producers, if they are overseas. After all, the places where the servers are want their tax cut. If we really went after them, the other countries would retaliate. Not only that, the producers would up sticks, and move their servers. For example, if you use AWS for your servers, you can move them in seconds. Who are you going to tax now? Not only can the server move, the company can move. They will move to lower tax, lower regulation. Same with all IP. So I see IP taxes falling to zero. Far better keeping the employment, rather than driving that offshore. So what are Facebook's assets in France. It's the payments from advertisers. Now under EU rules, there is freedom of movement of goods, services people, and capital. Tough for France, they can't get the taxes. So what's really going on. Basically western states are bankrupt. They have hidden their pensions debts off the books. France is bankrupt, and now its desperate for cash. Any cash, no matter what the damage. However the rich have hopped, over the border to Belgium and Switzerland. Bank of France reported that last month, French banks lost 44 bn EUR of deposits. So a run on France has started. In France the state has educated people they are entitled. Its a right. When that 'right' is infringed, there will be violence.

Primarily. However, the real blame doesn't lie with the banks, it lies with governments. It is lending as you say, but its governments borrowing and lying about their borrowing. The main method, and the sums involved are huge, and they are unfunded pensions liabilities. Take the money up front and spend it. Then rely on future taxpayers to pay the bills. Just like in the US and the subprime mortgages, its easy or no payouts up front, but lots of money flowing in. Then it tips. All back end loaded. Now if you hide the debts off the books, like Bernie Maddoff, for the same reason as Bernie, ... In the UK they are 12-13 times geared. Trying getting a mortgage on that basis. Particularly if you have large outgoings. Defense, roads, health, police, legal system, politicians, ...

Unfortunately, the emails show they have been manipulating evidence. That's why they don't want to release the raw data.

The Slashdot crowd like to be against "authority" ================== The reason is that have very strong evidence that its the correct decision

The invariant should only be checked when the code exits out of the class boundary. e.g. If I have two classes A and B. B calls a function on an object of class A. This function then calls another method on itself. It is only when the call come back to B, that the invariant needs to be checked. This is difficult to implement without help from the compiler. It is also interesting to compare assertions and unit tests. Assertions have a big advantage over unit tests. They are tested every pass through the code, not just for the cases that get tested by the unit tests. You get a lot more checking, for less effort. There are even tools that will 'unit test' code that has DBC. They generate lots of values that match the preconditions, run the code to see if the end result doesn't break the postconditions or assertions. Going forward, there is no doubt that DBC in the code is going to greatly help code checkers such as FxCop.