The difference being that you could have coded it from scratch - and you don't learn how to do that just by copy/pasting code.

Because nobody is making that many batteries yet and they're quite expensive? The whole Tesla "gigafactory" is so they can produce 500,000 cars per year. That's a drop in the bucket for supplying homes with batteries.

Yeah, Angela Merkel was upset the NSA was spying on her (and she's actually a legitimate target as a head of state and has her own security forces who are supposed to be securing her communications) but wants to return the favor to the rest of the world. They're all the same.

There's one barrier in front of space exploration - high launch costs. Everything else is surmountable or ignorable.

We've been sending people to Antarctica for a while. Many of the early explorers died. Tourists have died in Antarctica. Some space explorers will die because of shoddy equipment. We may even send people places with equipment known to be substandard. I wouldn't go but there seem to be plenty who would.

Nope - I haven't given up on my US citizenship yet.

And personal tax is a myth for the same reason because I just ask for a higher salary to offset my tax burden. By that logic you can't tax ANYTHING because the cost will get shifted somewhere else.

What makes you think that companies don't want and lobby for this complex tax code that is full of loopholes they can explot?

Don't like it? Move.

What Amazon is doing here is eating their cake and keeping it too. They get the advantage of using the infrastructure and then skip out on paying the taxes that fund the infrastructure. If they don't want to pay for it, don't use it.

Well, considering that you're NOT paying taxes in a tax haven, tax "heaven" seems reasonable.

Actually, it doesn't matter how long you reside outside of the US they still want their bite.

Well, as a normal US citizen (I'm an ex-pat so I have to deal with this crap) the US wants to tax you on your worldwide income. The only legal way to avoid that is to give up your US citizenship. Currently, I think the US is the only country that tries to tax you on your worldwide income so pretty much if you shift your citizenship to any other country you can then go reside in whatever low tax locale you can and only pay the local taxes. The US has come up with an "exit tax" though, so if you have a substantial amount of assets and want to give up your US citizenship they want you to pay for the privilege of leaving.

If it was only shielding non-US profits from US tax collection I'd be inclined to agree, but I think they're evading taxes in every country they're doing business in.

Luxembourg can afford to offer low tax rates because there's no cost to them. Amazon is using the infrastructure in other countries (e.g. roads, airports, etc.) to make money without paying for it. If they actually based their entire business in Luxembourg and then shipped worldwide I'd say it made sense. This is not competition on tax rates, this is just a scam.

I don't think it will work without a pretty wide-open connection to Amazon. All of those queries that we saw were not being satisfied by the local box. The shopping list was internet connected. That thing is not going in my house.

Essentially what Luxembourg is doing here is offering tax collection as a service. Luxembourg collects a small percentage but much more than they would get otherwise, since Amazon et al. don't do much business in Luxembourg and offers these large corporations a legal shield against other countries' taxes.

This would appear to be a bug in the international tax system.

How much does Amazon Australia spend on R&D? I'm betting they do make a profit and remit it back to the US parent which then spends on R&D. Quite fair for Australia to ask for a cut of the profit made in Australia.