Yes they can walk

So we're suppose to have machines driving vehicles some 80 years before they're smart? What idiot thought THAT was a good idea?

Your realise machines are routinely put in charge of vehicles that travel at 600 mph and in which mistakes can cause disintegration of the machine, killing everyone on board? Yet they're much safer than the human pilots we keep around as psychological placebos.

I think this list sums up the core of the Uber debate. It's a massive pile of accumulated odds and ends that have built up over the years, some of which are clearly useful and others which are clearly irrelevant. Unfortunately taxi regulation is about as exciting as dish water and so there's nothing that can blow away the cobwebs and rationalise things, short of a full blown Uber style takedown.

Examples of crap in the list above: taxi drivers must know the area they operate in. Really? What does it even mean to know the area? London black cab drivers have to pass an exam called The Knowledge that requires them to memorise street maps of the city, so at least it's well defined there, but this is nonsense from the pre-GPS era. There's no need for cab drivers to do it all in their heads these days, and I'd much rather they rely on the computer which will always pick the fastest route and can't decide to take a detour because the passengers looks like a tourist.

Another example: drivers must know the radio protocols. Why?! Uber drivers receive instructions via an intuitive smartphone app. Controlling cabs via radio is an obsolete technology yet the requirement to use it lives on.

Yet another example: cars must be painted a particular colour. Why? Uber cars are located using modern technology, not by watching the roads for vehicles painted in a deliberately ugly colour. This is another obsolete convention progress has made irrelevant - yet it's mandated.

Then we get to the more questionable things that aren't obsolete exactly, just arguable. Why is it possible to have enough driving violations to be struck off as a cab driver, but still be allowed to drive friends and family around? Surely you're either safe enough to use the public roads, or you're not, and the commercial relationships you have with the people inside make no difference?

People with a criminal record are banned from working as drivers? ALL crimes? What about crimes that don't involve being actually dangerous, like white collar crimes? Why can't hiring decisions like this be left to the cab companies?

Taxi drivers must know first aid? Presumably someone injured themselves in a cab once and some regulator thought this was a good response. What if that person injures themselves on the street? Why not require everyone to be trained in first aid? This kind of arbitrary distinction doesn't make much sense until you remember that we have these regulators sitting around with nothing better to do all day than craft rules for their tiny piece of jurisdiction.

And so on and so on. It's easy to take a reflexive "COMPANIES BAD GOVERNMENTS GOOD" position in these situations, but my experience of regulators have been that they never reform themselves .... all they ever do is add more and more requirements. Short of a company like Uber showing people how differently things can work, how would progress ever be made?

Comodo aren't trying misspellings of "root@live.com" - do you think domain validation requests are reviewed by humans? They are not and that's why they are cheap or free. They have a fixed list of hard coded addresses they are willing to try.

EV certs are reviewed by humans and that's why obtaining a fraudulent one is much harder, actually I never heard of it ever happening. But they cost more. It seems that live.fi redirects to live.com which has an EV cert for "Microsoft Corporation", so even if the fake cert had been used in a MITM attack, if you knew to check the address bar for the name of the company instead of just a padlock you would have been protected.

This is the second time this has happened to Microsoft. You'd think after the first time someone was able to register an administrator address @live.com they would have brainstormed all the names that might possibly be considered special, or hell, just checked which ones are being used this way, and then reserved them. How many can there possibly be? 10?

We can argue about whether sending an email is a good way to verify ownership of a domain or not, but really, someone who could register hostmaster@live.fi could play all sorts of social engineering games quite outside of the CA system.

Oh for goodness sake, this is economic illiteracy.

Again, as I said, Mr. Rich CEO will, most likely, invest his money. The bulk of that money just goes into the ridiculous "full circle" financial system that allows DEBT to be considered an ASSET.

Sure, if you don't believe investment is actually a thing or that it helps build the economy, I can see why you think Mr Rich is useless and Joe Sixpack is the rock on which all success is built. Then it's just a small step towards thinking that as Mr Rich isn't using that money for anything it might as well be taxed into oblivion and spent on Joe instead.

But that whole economic theory was tried out, not so long ago, and it turned out it didn't work so well ...

Alright, if you're so keen on mob justice then go for it. Just don't go crying when someone plucks an arbitrary unfair number from the air and makes you pay it, on the grounds that they just don't like you. What goes around comes around.

If it was only for six months, they probably fell afoul of the tax residency test. Normally countries tax on a yearly basis and re-evaluate tax residency based on how many days out of a year you spent in that country. Yeah it sucks for people who work in another place for six months: it'd be better if tax were calculated on a per day basis. But most tax systems are not efficient or digitised enough to do a good job of that.

It would be much better if they can establish actual calculations rather than arbitrary distinctions.

Their problem is they can't do that, because they don't have any coherent theory of how they want the tax system to work. Or rather, they do/did, but they're tearing it all up because they smell the opportunity to win votes at the next election. As they have no particular system in mind, what we get are so-called "laws" that merely assert the government can take whatever they decide is reasonable, for more or less any reason. It's sort of like how civil forfeiture in the USA works.

If they sat down and tried to craft a well thought out, precise specification of how things should work, they would probably end up with a system that vaguely resembles the one we have today. The "problem" is that today's system allows individual countries independence to decide how to set their own tax rates, and those countries compete aggressively to win employers. The UK does this too - it cut corporation taxes explicitly to attract businesses to London from other countries. So their position is inherently hypocritical: when the UK lowers taxes and attracts business, that's just companies relocating to dynamic and pro-business jurisdiction, and when Ireland does it, that's companies diverting profits and being terrible and immoral.

The Tories could point out the basic hypocrisy of this argument to the British people, but they prefer not to. It's easier to tell voters they can get a free lunch by making the evil foreigners pay for it. Of course, every government is making the same argument to their citizens simultaneously .....

They provide a country in which Google can make over 10 billion pounds a year. That's something Google should pay towards helping, surely.

"Google" is ultimately just a collection of people and assets. The assets are inert objects, they just exist and don't owe anyone anything. The services the UK provides only apply to people living in the UK, and their employees who live there already pay for those services via their own income taxes, VAT, council taxes and many more.

If you accept the bogus logic that the British government "provides" Britain to multinational companies and thus those companies should "help" then basically any country could apply the same logic to any company and demand any amount of money. It's entirely arbitrary. Google already helps the UK tremendously by providing its services, it doesn't also need to subsidise whatever random vote buying gimmick Osborne has come up with this time.

I really can't believe how foolish so many Brits are being about this. What happens when America turns around and observes that ARM makes a killing from phones sold to Americans that contain its microchips. As the US Government so nicely "provides" the American people who indirectly buy its products, it's only fair that ARM pays towards helping for it. Perhaps the tax can be 30%. That leaves plenty for when China, France, Germany, Greece and Russia come along and propose the same deal.

The tax system the world has settled on works the way it does for a reason. It's not something to just be torn up to try and buy a few quick votes in the runup to an election.

Instead, we are actually getting something done about the rules under which companies should be paying tax. As a lot of people have said all along, fuck the spirit of the law, apply the actual law.

I totally agree with you and you are absolutely wrong.

The "Google tax" law that Osbourne wants to enact appears to be little more than saying "any money stream we would like a piece of, we're gonna take". As far as I've been able to find out there really isn't much more to it than that. That's not a law, that's bringing back the reign of kings. It's been obvious for a long time now that the Tories have no coherent theory of how they want the global tax system to work. They just want more money.

It's not even clear why they need one. They already passed the General Anti Avoidance Rule (GAAR) which basically says "anything a reasonable person would find unreasonable is illegal", i.e. it suspends tax law entirely in the UK and replaces it with the whim of whoever is running the Revenue at the time. Given that they did the GAAR a few years ago already it seems they're implicitly agreeing that the arrangements of these companies is reasonable and legal but they want to undo it all the same.

The big problems this tax is going to run into are both legal and fundamental. The legal issues are that simply grabbing money in violation of the existing systems violates tax treaties. The UK is potentially setting itself up for a world of hurt if other countries decide it's now open season on British companies. Bear in mind the Tories have lowered corporation tax to attract companies from other countries to London. If, say, France, decides that a company is "diverting profits" out of France to the UK and pulls the same shit then the country could find itself ending up with less money than before, not more.

The second problem is that what it means to "divert profits" is left undefined. How do you carve up a company like Google across national borders? When someone clicks an ad in the UK, is that profit made in the UK because that's where the user is? Or California because that's where the ad system was developed? Or Germany because that's where the datacenter is? Or Ireland because that's where the sale was made and where the advertiser sent the money to and had the contract? Or all of them? Currently the system is it's Ireland because that's where the company with which the contract was signed is.

It gets even more convoluted. What if a British user never clicks ads and so is a net loss for the company. Do you then offset all those users against the revenue generating ones? How much does it even cost to serve the search result to a British user? They're using global, shared resources, so do you divide up the global costs by population? By usage? How do you even calculate profit by product when it's all integrated, let alone by country? And how do you stop the red tape required to calculate whatever arbitrary metrics are used from becoming overwhelming?

How will they even collect that tax? What if Google and Facebook shut down their UK offices?

The Tories have answers to none of these questions. They have no thinking behind this deeper than "let's grab some foreigners money and use it to buy off pensioners". The Treasury admitted they are assuming zero businesses will pull out of the UK because of these changes. How this will impact the global tax system, the costs of it, the chances of blowback? Unstudied.

The whole thing is an astonishing abandonment of a system of rules and laws.

That's a really bizarre argument.

You're basically asserting that poor people spend more money than rich people, and that rich people investing in things doesn't help the economy but Average Joe buying a six pack does.

This just doesn't make any economic sense. Which event do you think will have a greater impact on the overall economy: Warren Buffet finally shuffling off this mortal coil, or Average Joe? It'll be the former, obviously, as even though Buffet drives an ordinary car and lives in an ordinary house (or at least did), he spends his time moving money around in tax efficient ways and has tons of businesses under his management.

In other words: a flat tax "hurts" the poor much more than it hurts the rich.

Tax isn't actually meant to be about relative pain or making rich people cry. It's meant to be about funding of services. Flat taxes have a very simple moral argument for their fairness: you get what you pay for. If a loaf of bread costs the same regardless of whether you're rich or poor, then so should the use of a road.

In practice governments all use non-fair tax schemes because they want to try and reduce the gap between rich and poor, and don't really understand how to fix the underlying causes of those gaps. Also poor people are usually able to outvote rich people (given that poor and rich are relative, at least, politicians can always define rich to be a minority regardless of the absolute wealth of a society).

Your simple image by the way is a great example of how much emotional baggage gets dragged into debates on tax policy. Oh look, the poor child is standing on a box and can't see the football game. How sad. The problem is clearly equality of boxes. But if we give him some extra boxes (and boxes cost nothing remember), we fix that awful equality and now that's justice!

This analogy is so garbled I don't even know where to begin. You could just as well make an analogy of two otherwise identical guys turning up to a football game, and one is told he must pay 100x more for a ticket than the other guy, just because he earns money via his job and the other guy sits on the sofa watching TV all day. It'd be equally inflammatory and about as insightful.

Maybe in America, but here in Europe, tax is seen as the wheel to steer the ship of state, and social engineering is seen as important to maintaining a state in which the police do not shoot (many) people, and they don't (often) shoot back

Er, can you justify the notion that European tax policy has anything to do with police shootings? That sounds like bollocks to me. And I'm European. Fact is, all governments everywhere use tax to engage in social engineering with plenty of disastrous consequences ...

People keep forgetting that when it comes to talking about how awful the US is. The US doesn't have an illegal emigration problem, for a reason.

It does, actually, though you don't hear much about it in the US media.

The problem is that any US citizen is expected to pay tax to America regardless of where they actually are. No other country bar Eritrea has such a system. There are lots of cases of people who inherited US citizenship from their parents, or who were born there but actually never lived there, who wake up one day to discover that they owe massive amounts of back taxes. Until recently nobody cared about this because the US was unable to enforce this zany law, but now they're actually seizing control of the entire global financial system to implement it. And lots of people are trying to get rid of their US citizenship as a result.

The problem is, the US doesn't let you give up citizenship just because you asked. There are conditions. One of them is that your tax affairs must be in order. Obviously, for people who never paid US tax because they are not actually American except in some technical sense, this is an impossible criteria to fulfil - they are often liable for enormous fines for failing to file a lifetimes worth of tax returns. The IRS keeps granting temporary amnesties to try and avoid full blown disaster but there are still lots of people around the world who don't know this is happening and won't be eligible.

Worse, if the US suspects you gave up citizenship for tax reasons, they can simply ignore the renunciation and bam, you're right back in the hot water.

And then finally there's the exit tax. It doesn't apply to everyone but it's easy to trigger because you're expected to pretend you sold all your property, and then they tax a big wodge of that. Some people cannot afford it and end up trapped that way too.

So there is this crazy situation where people are attempting to leave the control of Uncle Sam by renouncing their citizenship and being unable to do so. It's a financial Berlin wall and the people trying to leave are effectively illegal emigrants.

The entire process is:
1) Unlock phone next to reader
2) Done

I'm waiting to start hearing stories about people who went out for a night on the town with no cash or cards, then their battery ran out. I'm not sure why a phone has to be involved in the payment process.

And in addition to the extra convenience, you also gain better security and privacy:

Contactless EMV cards have actual digital signatures involved in the protocol instead of this dumb tokenization hack, so I don't see any reason why it'd be more secure.

Apple Pay probably doesn't have much of a future outside the USA. You might get some people in the UK using it, but in many other territories iPhone market share is too low for merchants to care, and contactless EMV cards already work pretty well, so there's no incentive to adopt Apple Pay and end up sharing revenue with Apple. Fraud is under control, the system is secure and convenient, there's no enrollment process to screw up with, etc. It's not clear to me that there are any real advantages of Apple Pay over the existing system (I mean, existing outside the USA).

But what I wouldn't do is go somewhere to blow up random civilians. Even if it was effective. And I certainly wouldn't pretend that God wanted me to do it.

Are we discussing the behaviour of governments, or you personally? Because you start out by saying you'd never do something that the USA routinely does (drone strikes) and does in ways that no other country does. So if this is meant to be some kind of pissing match between the USA or Iran then Iran wins, as would basically any other country.

Iran with nukes is more war, not less. And if there is going to be a war, I want the US to win it, because in the end, we'll at least try to do the right thing, and failing that, we'll leave

Iran with nukes is probably just Iran with nukes, same as lots of other countries that have nukes but don't invade random other places. But you keep on believing in American exceptionalism if it makes you feel better. The rest of us will mentally place the USA right where it belongs - rock bottom on the peace tables.