Yeah, I agree with the growing sentiment that whilst Ive is a talented hardware designer, he is also seriously overhyped (by Apple, not himself).

Case in point: how long did it take for Apple to make a larger iPhone? A long time. I read a story about Ive in a magazine. It described the process of them deciding to make a bigger screened iPhone. The design team milled dummies of a bazillion different sizes and carried them around to try and figure out the perfect larger size. They spent ages on it. They tried literally every size. Eventually they produced something ..... just like their competitors. You know what? Apple ignored the trend for years. Then they procrastinated because their holy design team can't do anything fast. They could just have looked at what was selling well - it's not always a good idea but it's not always a bad idea either. But they made a mountain out of it.

Why do Apple's products have almost no customisability? Why did it take YEARS for them to even support setting a wallpaper image in iOS? Well, probably because:

Ive’s decision to offer choice was a challenge to Apple’s recurring theme of design inevitability. In one of our conversations, Ive was scathing about a rival’s product, after asking me not to name it: “Their value proposition was ‘Make it whatever you want. You can choose whatever color you want.’ And I believe that’s abdicating your responsibility as a designer.”

He was probably talking about a Motorola phone. But I guess that's why everything Apple makes is white. You wouldn't want to "abdicate your responsibility" by letting people choose colours! Well, unless it's a watch, of course.

If you read the whole New Yorker article you'll get an overwhelming sense that the design team there live in a bubble where they feel it's OK to spend months on a trivial detail and then produce something almost exactly the same as what their competitors did in a week. Apple has been consistently behind the Android market for years now when it comes to features and even new design ideas, and reading the article will reveal why.

Nope. The taxi drivers would compete for too few passengers by trying to undercut each other, skimming on costs thus reducing the safety for passengers etc.

Except that taxi prices are controlled, either by the state (yellow cabs) or by Uber. Taxi drivers don't dynamically adjust prices on an hourly basis by themselves.

Your desire to have the mythical unicorn of the free market still doesn't change the reality that those laws exist, they exist for a reason, and it's not up to Uber to decide what the law is.

Markets are hardly mythical. They're rather common.

Anyway you're arguing with things he never said. Obviously the laws exist. Obviously Uber cannot decide what the laws are. The only part you're disagreeing with him on is "they exist for a reason", but that's the crux of the issue - some people believe that reason is bogus. Limiting the numbers of cabs specifically to fight congestion is so indirect it practically screams corruption. You solve congestion with congestion charges, that apply to all vehicles equally.

Uber wants to run a illegal cabs, contrary to the law. The problem isn't the existence of the law. it's that Uber are a bunch of whiny self-entitled douchbags whose business model relies on running illegal cabs and playing the victim card.

Given that your post criticises Uber for "throwing a tantrum" your own writing comes across as extremely shrill. The problem is the existence of the law. You seem to think that all laws must be righteous and good and no organised group of people who give themselves a name and a logo should ever object to a law or try to get it changed (and good luck getting taxi laws changed agains the incumbents without a large large consumer group to back you up). That's an increasingly non-viable position in our world: governments create laws at prodigious rates and the effort needed to get them overturned is too large for individuals to take on.

LOL

Okay, you raging sexist. Let's take it down a notch for a second here ......... [short time later] ....... It still blows my mind that every time this comes up, almost nobody talks about the elephant in the room: Women are smarter and value their time better than men in general.

Plank in your eye before speck in your brothers, etc.

Yeah yeah yeah. It's so tough being a programmer.

Reality check: many, many other jobs are doing worse. You may think that programming is going down hill as a career* but would mothers rather that their daughters study Eng Lit and then become a Starbucks barista when making it as a journalist doesn't quite work out for them?

*though I don't see that, heck on the front page is a story about how much money is flooding into the industry from VC's right now

lol :-)

Um, yes.

How exactly do you intend to prove that something is safe? There have been cases in the past where chemicals were thought to be safe, and then found that they cause a higher risk of common disease but only after many decades (smoking is one obvious example of that).

How do you even discover that without large scale usage by humans? How would anything ever get approved? What if the drugs are believed to save lives, but it can't be proved that they're always side effect free? What then?

IMO, this shouldn't be up to governments. They should act as a source of trusted advice, at best. The idea that the FDA might have killed more people than it's saved (by delaying the use of medicines that were later found to be safe and effective) is an interesting one, though I can't remember if it's ever actually been proven or is just some libertarian meme.

How anyone, who is not a subject matter expert, can make a decision in this is just beyond me

You can't easily do so, but you can easily recognise the spin for what it is. As you say, the Guardian wants us to believe that the chemical industry is some cigar-smoking shades-wearing embodiment of corporate evil here, which is unlikely. It seems to be more like a dispute over the costs and benefits of enacting a ban before harm is conclusively established. So ..... just ignore it! My opinions on TTIP have been entirely unmoved by this story as it seems to be a dispute that would have happened anyway, regardless of whether TTIP existed.

Yes indeed. Whenever I read a story in the press that asks me to believe that a large group of people are utterly, totally evil and get their rocks off by being malicious psychopaths, I go looking for a reality check.

Digging through apparently endless links arrives us at this quote:

Peter Smith, executive director for product stewardship at CEFIC, which represents the European chemical industry, said the Nordic report attribution of health problems to EDCs was “arbitrary”. He said: “The link between exposure to a chemical and an illness has not been shown in many cases. The authors themselves say they have some trouble with causality.”

Smith said the delays to EDC regulation in the EU did not suit the industry. “Nobody is happy with the delays. But we would prefer it to be permanent and right rather than temporary and wrong.” He said case-by-case rigorous assessment was needed and that any precautionary action had to be proportional to the evidence of harm.

However, Professor Andreas Kortenkamp, a human toxicologist at Brunel University London in the UK, said the epidemiological work needed to prove causation is very difficult. For example, he said, analysing links to birth defects would mean having taken tissue samples from mothers before they gave birth. “But there is very good, strong evidence from animal and cell line test systems. The chemical industry only likes to emphasis the first part of that.” He said precaution was the only safe approach and said the Nordic report was good work.

In other words, the EU doesn't actually know these chemicals are dangerous to humans. They have some initial findings from animal studies that should be followed up on, and the chemical industry agrees with that, but heck if every mouse study translated directly to humans we'd all live a thousand years and be totally disease free by now.

So this entire dispute boils down to non-expert bureaucrats wanting to ban some chemicals early without clear evidence that they harm people, based on an abundance of caution, and the chemical industry saying "you should really prove your case first". Not entirely unexpected - EU regulators won't be the people who actually have to find alternatives and then do all the work to transition to them. They'll just issue a regulation, then go home and tell the wife/husband the story of how they fought the Big Chem to save helpless babies. The cost will get passed on the consumer. Skilled manpower and resources will be diverted from other things.

If they're right and the effects reproduce in humans - great, we got a few fewer years in which the chemicals were interfering with fertility. If they're wrong, well, the cost of that would be huge.

I don't see any clearly right or wrong side on this, which probably means the government should stay out of it. Mandate labelling at most, so consumers themselves can decide, at least until the scientific evidence of harm is stronger.

I don't recall anyone promising tax cuts during the last UK general election

e.g.

http://www.theguardian.com/pol...

Yes, the Tories won despite promising more austerity and that's the big difference between the UK and Greece. Regardless, if they thought it was affordable they would definitely not hesitate to use windfalls from taxing foreigners to buy off pensioner votes, for example. That's a very clear pattern in how governments do things.

And we spend 8% of government spending on interest not 25%.

You're right. I looked it up and it's 8%. I'm not sure why I thought it was 25%, perhaps I'm getting confused with some other country.

But the main point is, if a company wants to do business in the UK it should pay UK taxes on it's profits.

We're talking about a company that delivers things through the mail, here. What does "doing business in the UK" even mean? If Amazon were to have no offices or presence in the UK at all and just deliver everything via third party companies, would they be "doing business" there or not?

The problem with this sort of thinking is it ignores the consequences. Imagine a small company in the USA gets an order for its new widget from the UK. The company wants to sell, but ...... wait! The UK has screwed up laws. A single sale to a British person means the UK Gov will classify the company as "doing business" in the UK and suddenly all the companies profits are taxed twice. No can do, therefore, no sale.

So in practice that's not how the system works.

What about first employee in the country? Well, same problem. Google looks at the UK and says, hey, we'd like to hire people in Britain to do engineering and sales. But ..... it makes no sense, because hiring the receptionist for the new office will cost us a billion dollars in new tax, as suddenly our profits all get taxed twice.

So the scheme you outlined is not workable. It'd just mean nobody does business with the UK.

The usual variant people demand is "tax only the profits made in the UK" but this is also so vague and poorly thought out as to be unworkable. Where are profits made, exactly? This is easier to see with a company like Google or Facebook. The physical location where profits are made is unknowable because many countries contribute to the whole. For Amazon people tend to say, it's the sales to people in the UK, but then you're asking for a sales tax not a profits tax, and the EU VAT changes have now put this in place (at massive bureaucratic cost).

The way it works is that Amazon UK pays enormous licensing fees to Amazon USA for use of the brand. That way the money ends up back in America where it can be spent on things Amazon wants to spend it on.

The moment such a company paid money to the owner so they could buy a new TV or whatever, it'd count as personal income. So in a well designed tax system it'd not be quite that easy.

"and therefore corporate taxes are evil, and should be abolished, not raised." - if you do that then the people will have to pay more to make up the shortfall.

swillden's point is that it would be neutral. There is no shortfall, exactly. Tax reallocates resources that would have been used for other things, it's not like a mine that you actually dig gold out of.

Whilst governments might feel the need to raise personal tax rates if they no longer received corporation tax, as corporations are no longer being taxed that money will end up doing something else instead. It might lower prices, in which case paying more personal tax to government wouldn't change your standard of living. Or it might get paid out to shareholders, i.e. you or your pension fund. Or it might get re-invested into developing new products, which again would improve your standard of living to offset the fact that you have less money than before. Remember money is just a proxy, what ultimately matters is wealth not money. (or happyness)

At the moment personal taxes are high because not everyone pays their fair share of tax, that includes businesses and personal, if everyone did the right thing and paid what was owed, we'd all be taxed less.

A common misconception spread by propaganda in the press. Tax evasion rates in western societies are very low. Almost everyone already pays what they owe. The UK is not Greece - there's no blood to squeeze from that stone. The entire tax avoidance argument is that some people should owe more than the rules say they do.

Personal taxes in Anglo countries are high for a bunch of reasons, including but not limited to: extremely expensive and pointless foreign wars, increasing life expectancies that cause spiralling healthcare and pension costs as governements are loathe to adjust the retirement age, hangover from the banking bailouts, the general decline in labour force participation over time meaning more people on benefits, unaffordable tax cuts (USA), the massive interest payments on debt incurred by previous governments (UK), etc etc.

They are not high because immoral people are somehow dodging the tax man.

Free trade is only desirable to the stronger economy/ies in the bloc

Maybe you didn't notice all the little countries with tiny economies that bent over backwards to join the EU in recent years. Obviously a whole lot of countries came to the same conclusion independently - they wanted in, because they wanted access to the single market. If you're a specialist company in Bulgaria making a particular type of ball bearing and joining the EU means you can suddenly easily sell to a market of several hundred million people, that's a win. Yes, your lone local Bulgarian customer might decide to jump ship to a Spanish supplier once it gets easier to do so, but that's offset by the sudden ease of replacing them.

I don't think you can argue with this reality - if the EU only benefited large economies, then all the smaller Balkan and eastern European countries would have simply formed their own trading blocs. But they didn't. Your position assumes they are all stupid.

Amazon doesn't make profit in any country. But hey, would you prefer they sent the money from the UK immediately to Seattle? If the USA and EU were in a single trade bloc then they could certainly do that and cut Luxembourg out of the equation, but it wouldn't make any difference to the UK's tax take.