You don't need to buy a writable token from China when you can buy a real Oyster card more easily, and you don't then need to worry about it not looking genuine....unless, of course, you're expecting to get through a great many of them by them getting blocked every day (in which case, watch out for those CCTV cameras if you draw attention to yourself). Or you could use a phone to talk to the reader instead of a card. But if they've done it properly then the key will be different for each card, based on a secret TfL knows and on the UID, so even if you can clone one you might find it a good deal harder to forge one from scratch. If there's a utility on Google Code that will extract the key from a MiFare DESFire EV1 then you should link to it. I think a lot of people here would be interested to know it exists.

The writers are already commonplace: they're exactly the same as the readers, and an NFC phone can do it. But, you'll need an encryption key to do it (or you'll need to break the authentication or extract the key). These things are not just dumb storage devices, you have to authentication to them to read or write more than the card's unique ID (and you'd have to be a fool to rely just on that to identify a card). The old cards (MiFare Classic cards) are clonable because the encryption was weak. DESFire EV1s, like new Oyster cards, use 3DES or AES.

That would appear to show over half of your income taxes being paid by the top 5% of earners. Does that not qualify as 'people able to afford [solar power installations]'?

However, more energy is used by the rich (because they can afford it) and more of the costs of that energy use in ill health falls on the poor (because only the poor live in the most polluted places). And, of course, most tax revenue is paid by the rich(-ish). I certainly wouldn't agree with preventing new nuclear power, but there's real harm from current fuel use and if solar can help with that in a politically acceptable way then it's worth supporting.

IMO, it's as much about anchoring as anything else. For the same reason shops put a $5000 handbag in the window to make $300 bags inside seem appropriately priced, the price of traditional bulbs leaves people outraged at the cost of LEDs. Even if they're a different product that lasts longer and costs less overall. And even if they put the $30 LED bulb in a $200 light fitting. Personally, I suspect that some people wouldn't willingly switch until light fittings can come with LED bulbs built in, designed to last the lifetime of the fitting (or at least as something designed to be replaced just a few times).

They certainly should pay taxes in Argentina (and they probably do, but probably very little). The big problem is that it's very hard to define what a company's Argentinian profit is vs their Brazillian profit or their Irish profit. The costs are all over the world, and often not specific to a particular country where the service is supplied. We can see, often easily, that the system is being gamed. But that isn't the same thing as being able to say what the correct profit to tax actually is. That's why I think that profits should be taxed when they become dividends/interest payments (and the earned/unearened tax gap fixed). In the UK we pay one rate for salaries (20%/40%/45% (income tax) plus 12%/2% (national insurance) plus 13.8% (employers' national insurance)), a reduced rate on dividends (0%/32.5%/42.5%) + 20% of profits on profits, and other rates (20/40/45% only, I think) on things like interest. The corporate tax acts a bit like the profit equivalent of the extra payroll taxes many companies have, like our national insurance. But it gets avoided. So instead, why not charge one set of bands for everything (30%/45%/50%, say, or whatever it takes to raise the same revenue). Then scrap the corporate tax. People will then pay what was corporation tax but via their dividends.

I doubt that Google sells advertising to Italians, from Ireland or not, in USD rather than Euros. And no money comes out of Italy's reserves because:

• Italy and Ireland share a currency, so there's no need for any currency exchange to get it out.
• Italy doesn't have foreign currency reserves, the European Central Bank does.
• Unlike Argentina, most well governed countries don't intervene in their exchange markets on the minutest level. An Italian wanting to swap Euros for Dollars just has to keep waiting and/or lowering their price until someone with Dollars who wants Euros comes along. Reserves are not involved.

They certainly do subvert the system. But it's very hard to calculate what they should pay. If you have many servers in many places, and they all play a part in serving customers in many other places. And if you do development in a few places but that software goes on servers which serve the whole world. And if you do things like research on self driving cars in the US, but with the goal of producing a worldwide product. And if your salesmen sometimes sell to a big client who uses one contract to show ads all over the world. etc. What's your 'Italian' profit? How do you divide the costs in to Italian costs, and the revenues in to Italian revenues? Whose rules do you use for deciding what's a cost, what's an investment, what gets tax credits and how things are depreciated? It's all an accountant's opinion (and wet dream). It's an essentially made up number that can be manipulated, obfuscated and argued over endlessly. And it's going to waste a lot of resources in the company and the tax authorities doing that.

Much easier to tax dividends (and capital gains, of course, but I don't see why those should be taxed differently).

Probably. Taxing dividends and not profits probably won't happen because people (falsely) see corporation taxes as less of a tax on themselves than income taxes are. And even if they can get over that they'll get upset over foreign shareholders not paying anything to their exchequers. So, instead, we'll have a big mess of ambiguous and conflicting rules and political compromises.

Italy is a place where a part of what everyone produces within its borders is pooled/redirected/taken/stolen (delete according to political views) in order to produce roads, policing, waste disposal, health care, defence and other public services to people living within the same boundaries. And this is done because it makes human lives better. Though, admittedly, being Italy, often not done very well. And the small group is elected (though, again, being Italy, often despite being venal and corrupt to the point of comedy). And I think you'll find that the vast majority of Italians will agree that the principal of taxing to provide public services is the right one, even if they disagree with particulars and misuse. Taxation is not illegitimate.

Because it's economic activity involving people within their borders - and if you want your tax system to be legitimate (and accepted and able to support your public services), you can't just decide that big groups of people get to not be taxed without breaking the law. Again, it comes down to 'because it makes life better': governments need a way to redirect some of their country's resources to public services.

It wouldn't seem reasonable to use the target of the adverts alone to decide who gets to tax the cost of them. But if Italian products (or imported ones, for that matter) are being sold to Italians in Italy through adverts delivered specifically to Italians then, short of finding a genuinely loss-making operation, it would seem ridiculous to suggest there's no Italian profit to tax. Given the system tax systems we've got, and given that Google actively subverts them, it's quite right for the Italian government to want to pursue this.

Where you DO have a good argument is in suggesting that it's next to impossible to actually physically locate profit within national boundaries in a way that isn't tortuously complicated, ambiguous and very open to abuse. It's also wasteful; think of all the pointless bureaucracy that goes on to make it happen. IMO, it'd be much more sensible to levy the tax when it becomes a dividend (or loan interest payment, on which corporate taxes aren't currently levied). With quite a small number of exceptions people are much easier to locate, and taxing the dividends means you can make the tax progressive by applying tax allowances and bands. It would remove a huge amount of tax collection and reporting effort and remove the risky bias companies have in favour of debt over equity. Personally, I'd also take the opportunity to remove the huge imbalance between the tax on salaries and other kinds of income by setting the tax regime the same for all of them.

Look at how many people say this. Look at how many people do stupid things right in front of cameras, or commit obviously detectable crimes because they're very angry. Look at how many people get punched in bars with no legal consequences. Look at how if you get punched in the street in the UK on a Saturday night you'll probably get arrested (a blogging policeman once said this happens because there's always a counter-accusation and it's easier to arrest everyone vaguely related and sort it out in the police station). Hell, look at how people react when you take a picture of them in public....and look at how policemen react to cameras, too. People HATE this. People might end up in jail, but glass wearers are still going to get hurt, pushed around, threatened, stolen from, abused, harassed, thrown out of places and generally maltreated.

There'd be many ways they could move - new companies emerging in different places and old ones shrinking, hiring freezes in one office and increases in another, outright relocations. You'd have to ask an accountant/mover if you need to know the cost. The reasons for shouldering the cost could be many: better quality housing, lower commuting times, better quality of life, a way to attract staff who might not find that area appealing, lower office costs and so on. And, of course, if whole segments of the community are not being well served then its something city/state planners should be taking a legitimate interest in, which may make life difficult for companies that need permits.

The problem comes about because of the tendency of industries to cluster. It's good for employers because they get a pool of employees, easier networking, more spontaneously presented commercial opportunities and so on. It's good for employees because they get competing employers and combined career opportunities for spouses. But it also causes problems when the cluster gets huge - as I experience around London - of high housing costs, poor housing sizes, difficult transport and huge problems for people on lower wages. One answer, of course, might be creating a new cluster elsewhere (leaving the old one still there, but not as large/growing as much), but that's not something one employer can do on its own, even if it wants to.

The US is a big country....it just doesn't make sense from a quality of life point of view (and that is, after all, the point of economic activity) to have huge numbers of people competing to live in one tiny corner.

I don't think you can blame landlords for increasing prices when the value of the housing they're renting goes up. You can't expect landlords to continue to let houses they could sell and then use the proceeds to invest in something similarly risky with a better return (like housing elsewhere, for example). If the cost of housing is going up because there are more households who want them than housing available then its going to affect rents as much as prices - and, if it somehow doesn't because you use something like law to prevent it then you're still going to have the problem of how you choose who gets a house and who gets to be homeless or move elsewhere. A shortage of housing (or of good quality housing) is a physical problem that can only have real, physical answers, not financial ones - building more good housing, building something like high speed rail lines to expand the land area in use, or moving people (and, more to the point, their employers) elsewhere.

And a bad thing for younger home-owners who want to trade up repeatedly in the future. Few people in that situation complain about the price of their house going up, but if you do the sums you find they're likely to buy more additional housing in the future than they've bought so far.

One man's 'depiction of rape' is another's depiction of consensual bondage or role play. You can bet that if depictions of rape become criminal (and, as always, mainstream films will get an opt-out because people who watch those may be 'one of us' instead of 'one of them') then some perfectly nice, considerate, non-violent and non-malicious people will end up with their lives ruined whilst the definition is sorted out. As with teenagers charged over sexting (to protect teenagers, obviously), law can too easily be a weapon where those wielding it don't care what comes out of the other end and who it's aimed at...

Notice that this would work just as well with dollar notes. This isn't done, even though governments have far more control over them than bitcoins.

Indeed he won't care, because he hasn't done this to 'protect children' or any similar thing. It's about political positioning: it's purpose is to present a certain image of the Conservative party - we're this sort of people - to a particular segment of voters who they hope will vote for them. (It wouldn't surprise me if this includes wives wondering what their husbands are doing as much as parents). It also helps distinguish themselves from their coalition partners who are the most pro-civil liberties of the mainstream parties, and who may be seen by some as saying 'we oppose protecting children'.

A huge amount of government policy and law is symbolic. Like the rest, you will notice that it doesn't have to actually work in order to achieve these goals.

And, possibly more important: how can the operator of a site know in order to request unblocking it? They're much more likely to be willing to go to significant effort to make that happen. I suspect that the filter writers will not want this to be easy - the last thing they'll want is to spend all their time and money handling disputes.