Do companies pay enough gas tax to pay for the proportion of road use they generate?

Do they pay enough for the enforcement of patent laws, trademark laws, for the military that protects their assets, etc etc.

Even if you take the naive position that only things directly consumed by a company matter (thus not healthcare, education etc) it's a pointless pedants argument. If that all had to be funded by taxes on workers then wages/sales taxes and various of other things would increase instead. They'll end up spending whatever they save in tax on costs instead.

if the profits were made in tax free countries, so be it.

A viewpoint that requires a special kind of stupidity in those who don't appreciate it is purely theoretical. Companies aren't making billions in tax free countries, they are making billions in countries with taxes and using loopholes to legally avoid paying the vast majority with the help of a select group of countries. Getting every country to stop supporting this kind of action is impossible, so America is changing the laws to make it pointless instead.

If you can find one example of an American company that is currently paying less than 19% tax on it's average foreign profits without using a convoluted trick like double Irish I'd be amazed, so feel free to share.

What really worries people in Japan is that previously undiscovered problems keep coming to light at existing plants, now that proper checks are being done. Any trust that existed has proven to have been misplaced.

To be fair, some of the issues could not have been discovered when the plants were built. Equipment to find fault lines like the ones discovered recently did not exist in the 1980s. That just makes it worse though, because it demonstrates how even now we are discovering new issues and improving our understanding of the environment.

When the consequences of an accident are so severe being 99% sure it's okay isn't enough to gamble on. Of around 450 commercial electricity producing reactors 6 have melted down catastrophically. That's a 1.33% failure rate, and doesn't include all the other serious problems at nuclear plants. It's no wonder nuclear plants can't get commercial insurance.

The problem is that no insurer will insure a nuclear plant, so governments have to take the liability on themselves. Essentially nuclear operators get subsidised free insurance, so where are normally a commercial insurer would require high standards the government has to and the government is vulnerable to lobbying (bribes) and other shenanigans.

The tax they did pay was on stuff they couldn't dodge, like employment taxes, sales tax and taxes on physical assets. There was a lot more tax that would have been due on their global profits that was dodged by wiping those profits out with massive fees paid to the Irish shell company. The profits were converted to those fees and moved to Ireland, where they are not taxed

That's what the Double Irish it, it's what they are already doing. Apple in the US pays massive fees to an Irish shell company for use of the name Apple, and thus makes very little profit in the US that can be taxed. The only tax they do pay in the US is on their US operations like income tax and sales tax. The Irish company pays no tax at all.

I wonder if say Apple would really relocate outside the US. I don't just mean incorporate some shell company like they have in Ireland, I mean really move their operation to avoid paying tax. At the very least the top management would have to go overseas, and would probably want to take their engineering teams with them. They would have to spend a few more billion on a new campus and abandon the one they just erected.

Just to clarify, I was suggesting what you are suggesting. Tax must be paid somewhere. No more Double Irish. The EU's solution is to make companies pay tax on the business they do in each country, even if they offshore the profits.

I thought it was the corporations stealing by leeching off society and then not paying the membership fees. If they don't want to pay any tax they are free to leave society and stop stealing our free education and training, healthcare, roads, police and judicial services etc.

It's well understood what they are doing, because the companies are quite open about it. Back in the 90s Apple invented something called the Double Irish, which is where they register is shell company with no employees or other interesting in Ireland and have all the other Apple corporations around the world pay their profits to it in exchange for using the Apple name. Starbucks, Google, Amazon and others all do the same. Since the local corporations don't make any profit (due to the "crippling" fees they pay to Apple Ireland) they pay next to no tax.

So why doesn't Apple Ireland pay tax on all the money it takes? Irish law states that corporations that are headquartered overseas pay corporation taxes where their headquarters are. So Ireland says they pay in the US, the US says they pay in Ireland... and thus they pay no tax on all that money.

Of course they are quite open about this and list the money held in Ireland as part of their balance sheets. Apple is currently taking low interest loans to pay shareholders based on the vast reserves it has in Ireland, rather than bring some of that money back and pay ~40% tax on it.

The EU is working on a fix where corporations pay tax based on how much business they do in each country. This seems to be the best that the US can come up with, given the political climate.

This is clearly aimed at companies abusing the "Double Irish" system. Seems like the rate should be set much higher, so that companies are punished and lose more than they would if they did the right thing and repatriated profits and paid the normal tax rates on them.

Back in 2004 I visited my girlfriend in Japan. She had 100Mb symmetrical fibre and it cost her £23/month. They installed it early because they knew it would last decades and keep them competitive well into the multi-gigabit era. They don't mess about, and it allows them to offer advanced services that others can't.

BT always do them minimum required to stay semi competitive, since in many areas they have no competition anyway.

Excuses, excuses. I don't want to call you a fanboy, but this is a classic fanboy tactic. Blame the technology, make out it is so badly broken it's the technology's fault and not Apple's.

The reality is that hundreds of millions of people use wifi successfully and with minimal hassle every day. Yeah, it's not perfect but 20 years ago widespread low cost networking was just a dream, and now we have thousands and thousands of devices sharing the 2.4GHz band more or less without issue. If anything it's biggest problem is that it's too popular and has saturated 2.4GHz.

To look at it another way, all other major operating systems managed to implement it in a fairly reliable way. I come home, my phone and laptop connect to wifi automatically and just work, despite the congestion and mix of standards and vendors.

On the other hand look at the UK. We used to have two parties (the Arseholes and the Bastards) and a small third one that never got in but always had a few people elected to parliament. Then last time around the two main ones balanced out so evenly that the smaller third one became king maker and formed a coalition with the Bastards.

Now we have another contender, the Closet Racists, who are making waves. We have an election in May and it will be interesting to see how well they do. It's entirely possible they may end up in a coalition with some power. A decade ago no-one would have dreamed of all this, now it's a reality.

Things can change, it's just not easy to engineer that change. In our case it was initially due to a very close election, and then due to grass roots support for the Closet Racists and a particularly charismatic/offensive leader. If you don't happen to be a Closet Racist don't worry, in other countries far left parties have got in too so it can go either way.

Don't give up hope, it can happen.

Actually it seems quite reasonable for the money, assuming that the battery is new (re refurbed quality replacement cells). It's no screamer but a Core 2 Duo is plenty for most desktop stuff. The 1280x800 resolution is fine for a 12" display on an ultra-portable. 8GB of RAM max, and with an SSD it should be pretty quick. Even the GPU isn't bad.

Plus you get a nice Thinkpad keyboard, still pretty hard to beat, and Thinkpad build quality. If you want a secure laptop for business or general desktop stuff I'd say it is pretty good. Where else are you going to get something even half as trustworthy? In the EU all electrical items have a minimum 2 year warranty as well.