There is a huge difference! The "graduate tax" as you call it is independent of your salary. A teacher who earns not much more than £25k/year will be paying off the loan for much of their career whereas some investment banker in the city will probably pay it off in the first year or two and barely notice the effect. Worse, because the teacher takes longer to pay it off they pay more because interest accumulates on the loan.

This has none of the typical traits of a real tax. Taxes on income are almost always percentage based so that those who earn more pay more. In addition the rate is usually, but not always, progressive so that the rate on income above a certain amount is taxed at a higher percentage rate. Were this funded by a graduate tax then you would expect the high earning investment banker to pay far more in tax than the poorer teacher whereas in fact the exact opposite is the case due to the interest!

The end result is that loans provide an massive financial disincentive to work in low paid but essential professions such as teaching, nursing, the police etc. and encourage people to go into more lucrative professions. Worse loans, unlike grants, also makes the investment banker think that s/he got there all by themselves with no help from the government. Give them a free education and they will have received something valuable from the state which was paid for by taxes and so they are less likely to complain about paying tax in the future because they can see that everyone in society benefits from it.

True but that range was on the assumption that the Higgs boson cancelled certain divergent cross-sections. Nature could possibly have provided a different mechanism to do that and yet still have a Higgs boson at some higher energy scale. Of course at this point the Higgs becomes a lot less interesting because it no longer solves a problem with the Standard Model but nevertheless until we did the experiment you could not exclude that possibility.

That is not true because there is no upper bound on the energy at which you can claim your model of new physics exists. No matter what the energy of your machine is I can always crank up the energy of my model so that you cannot see it there. The point at which people stop being interested in a theory is when they rule it out as an explanation of a particular phenomenon it was invented to solve not when they have excluded any possibility that the theory exists in nature.

That is exactly the definition I am using. The problem is that you are not stating you hypothesis correctly. The hypothesis which is interesting to us particle physicists is not "does the Higgs boson exist?" but "is the Higgs boson the primary mechanism for breaking the electroweak symmetry by giving fundamental particles mass?".

Extending this to religion the question about whether a creator exists is exactly the same as asking whether the Higgs boson exists: you can only ever get a definitive answer in the positive case where what you are looking for exists and you find it. If you want a falsifiable hypothesis then you need to ask a more specific question e.g. is phenomenon X explainable by mechanism Y.

Agreed but the real point is that if not everyone goes to university then the cost borne by students is far less. When I was at university in the UK tuition was free because the government paid it. The argument being that I would then go and get a job and with a higher salary my higher taxes would pay for the investment the government had made.

However this model collapses when 50+% of the population goes to university. First the universities have to either provide additional teaching resources and/or lower graduation standards because such a large increase means that the educational standards on the incoming students are lower. This is exacerbated by the fact that the average salary of all graduates drops because the total wages available does not increase with the number of degrees granted so essentially you have the same tax base as before but now have to pay for twice as many degrees.

The result is that tuition has gone through the roof. The same degree that was free for me 25 years ago now costs £9,000/year ($16,400/year). It is also now a 4 year degree (used to be 3 years) because of the lower standards in school. Of course this means that students acquire so much debt that they have to be extremely concerned about their potential salary after graduating. The puts an increasing pressure for universities to shift from the academic institutes of higher education which have served society for the best part of a millennium (or possibly longer in some cases) towards becoming vocational training colleges where each course is targeted to a specific career which provides enough income to pay of the massive debt so good luck finding the next generation of teachers!

Actually that is not quite correct. The notion of a Higgs boson is not falsifiable in principle. All you need to do is say that it has a higher mass than you can reach with your accelerator. At some point this mass will be so large that your higgs can no longer explain the things that it was invented to solve but that is NOT the same as saying that there is no fundamental scalar Higgs field out there - all it says is that if such a field exists it would no longer be able to explain why fundamental particles have mass.

Least you think that this is a purely hypothetical argument this is the exact situation we have at the moment with a theory called Supersymmetry. So far we have seen no hint of this symmetry but it is arguably the best explanation we have as to why the Higgs has such a low mass. However if after the next run of the LHC we still see no hint of it then it is likely that, if it exists at all, it is probably at too high an energy to explain why the Higgs is so light and so nature likely solves this problem a different way. This is usually when theories get dropped - not because they have been proven wrong but because they have been shown not to solve the problem they were invented for.

Really? Whether or not you believe in a religion it is worthwhile knowing what the basic beliefs of the major world religions are because chances are you are likely to have to interact with people who do believe in them. Besides, they do teach religion in US schools: they just cover it in their science classes! ;-)

What? No, Google's motto is to do with doing good for the world rather than take short term gains, see this. Not paying taxes and forcing others to pay more to cover the shortfall is precisely taking a short term gain and causing others pain. Sounds pretty close to the definition of 'evil' to me.

Really? You mention surveillance of citizens which is exactly what Google does for economic gain. They also do what Google thinks is good for society which is not the same as what people think is good for society. Google is not elected by, nor accountable to, the people of the UK and worse, is in fact a foreign corporation with interests that may diverge greatly from those of the UK. I will grant you that I tend to agree with a lot of Google's aims (other than immoral tax evasion) but people have no control over this and it could change in a second with a new CEO.

Indeed if we are to discuss types of government then I would suggest that the corporate philanthropy model you espouse is more akin to a feudal system. Google is the feudal lord who does what it thinks is best for us peasants without us having any input or control whatsoever. That model only works when you have a benign lord but, as history shows, the next to inherit the throne may be far from benign and that overall this model of government is an abject failure. In addition it is not just Google who is doing this but Amazon, Starbucks etc. Are you going to argue that all the large multinational companies playing this tax evasion game are contributing more to society than they would if they had to pay tax like the rest of us? Google may be the best of the bunch at the moment but there is more than just Google playing this game.

As Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.". You can quibble about the type of democracy in the UK and you can argue that the government should be doing a better job with the way it spends taxes (and I would not disagree) but I would still claim that history shows that, averaged over time, it is still far, far better than letting unelected, powerful corporations decide.

I will admit that this was my first reaction upon hearing it too - blame the politicians for not having set up laws to stop this. However when you think about things more it is extremely hard to come up with any rules to fix this unless you tax the revenue of companies rather than their profits. I don't see anyway that you can easily differentiate between a genuine expense for a company vs. a profit moving expense designed to make the purchasing company unprofitable while making the selling company profitable.

The only way I could see this working would be to pass a general law forbidding the movement of profits by this method and giving the Inland Revenue the power to decide when this has taken place. This would be a very vague law with potentially far reaching consequences that gave government a lot of power. However when it comes to these large, multinational companies I'm not sure there is any other way because they can use their army of lawyers to devise a way around any concrete, well defined law that does not enforce a general principle.

The point is that the people making the deal are not physically located in Ireland. The negotiation, sale etc. is all taking place in the UK. They then twist the law to the point where they can legally claim it took place in Ireland. Also while you might be able to decide whose laws are used to negotiate disputes regarding the contract you cannot decide whose laws apply to taxation resulting from the contract.

They are following the absolute letter of the law and using it to get around their social responsibilities to support the society in which they operate which is immoral, or to put it another way evil. So I'm guessing they have had the same lawyers figure out how to get around their "do no evil" rule.

They are not signed in Ireland they are signed in the UK where both parties live and work. You should not be allowed to just arbitrarily decide which countries laws apply when everything is taking place in the UK unless you are going to give individuals the same power and I can go shopping for the country with the lowest income tax rate too. The problem is that large, international companies can afford enough lawyers that they twist laws into knots to get out of paying their share of society's infrastructure costs.

They are following their own laws: that is quite literally the problem. Despite the best efforts of the US government, and apparently to the surprise of some of its citizens, the US constitution does dot apply to other countries like the UK. It is perhaps even more surprising that it often does not seem to always apply in the US as well but that's a different issue to the one being discussed here.

My guess is that there was probably some Victorian-era law on the books passed back when international communication was a rare and uncommon thing which allowed the government to monitor such rare events. Fast forward 100 years and suddenly a huge fraction of everyone's communication is international. So for a group called "Privacy International" the sad irony is that there is no international privacy in the UK.

No a C&D is threatening you with being sued for large amounts of money and is written to be as threatening as possible in order to get you to back down. In civilized society when making a request of someone you do not normally start by immediately threatening them with the consequences of not complying. This generally tends to be counterproductive because it antagonizes people who will then either do the minimum possible to comply with your demand and/or figure out a way around your demand which causes the maximum inconvenience for you while complying with the letter of what is required by law. In addition a company which relies of customers wanting to shop there is not going to gain business by antagonizing its customers. We all understand that a company has to protect its trademarks but it does not have to be (or hire) a jerk to do so.