The observation that we are not seeing them commonly appearing across the universe at a distance of some 10 billion light years.

Yes, they were doing pretty great, so great that the name "Celtic Tiger" was invented specifically to describe the Irish economy.

Like most economies that have inflationary currencies, this led to exuberance and dumping of money into a housing bubble, on the theory that whilst money inflates away houses don't. Being in the Euro had nothing to do with this, it's a disease that affected the USA and the UK as well, even though they have their own currencies and central banks. In fact these governments (but especially the UK) were all desperately trying to push people into the housing bubble due a massive and misguided social engineering program rooted in the belief that home-ownership is an end rather than a means.

But this is not specific to Ireland. It's actually a problem fundamental to an environment with compound inflation (recall that at 2% per year, prices go up every year by more than the previous year because inflation is expressed as a percentage rise on the previous year, not a fixed reference point).

Quoting the wikipedia article I linked:

During that time, Ireland experienced a boom, which transformed it from one of Europe's poorer countries into one of its wealthiest. The causes of Ireland's growth are the subject of some debate, but credit has been primarily given to state-driven economic development; social partnership among employers, government and unions; increased participation by women in the labour force; decades of investment in domestic higher education; targeting of foreign direct investment; a low corporation tax rate; an English-speaking workforce; and membership of the European Union which provided transfer payments and export access to the Single Market.

So they went from one of the poorest countries in Europe to being equal to some of the best in only a couple of decades, and a big chunk of that was due to low corporation tax (but not necessarily low taxes in general, mind you) combined with access to the single market.

The Irish people love their low corporation taxes and did not really raise them even during the global recession, because they have attracted tons of very high-skilled jobs from well known, rich corporations - companies like Apple, Google, Intel and others. The latter two alone created tens of thousands of jobs, which in a small country is a Big Deal, and they're far from the only ones. So not surprisingly, a policy that has created a spigot of good local jobs is popular - a government with higher tax revenues but that spends it all on welfare is not obviously a better state to be in.

This isn't necessarily a strategy that can be replicated everywhere: Ireland was catching up from behind during its boom years, not accelerating ahead of all the other countries. And some of its appeal to international companies was the fact that it wasn't very rich, so wages weren't extremely high. But there are other parts of Europe that are now also behind (think: Spain, Portugal, northern England), so perhaps they can consider whether the same strategy would help.

Some will say this leads to a race to the bottom, and there's some truth to that, but the question is does it matter? It's not like taxing corporations is the only way to raise revenue. Indeed, if you trace a money flow, you'll see that when someone buys something, there's sales tax/VAT paid on that. Then (ignoring the case where the money is sent back to HQ abroad for a moment), it's booked as profit and tax is paid on that too, and then the company pays its wages and possibly pays employment taxes as part of that, and of course property taxes for the place where the employees work, the employee pays income taxes on their wages as well, and in some places also pays a wealth tax at the end. So by the time the money has flowed from one person to another (which is what we really care about, given that economies are ultimately made of and in service of people), it's been taxed many times repeatedly. Rebalancing that does not imply a lower overall tax take, but it may imply a simpler tax system, less paperwork and lower deadweight costs!

All of that is the sort of argument you might find in an academic discussion of tax incidence. What really happens is that corporation taxes are used as a way to try and address social inequality because corporate profits are perceived as making a handful of people extraordinarily wealthy (whether this is the best way to address that, is a matter I leave on the table for further debate).

They do business in Italy. They get money in Italy.

They do business in Ireland and they sell to customers in Italy. The whole point of the EU is it's a single market, that means, you can establish your company once and sell to everyone within that market. If you set up in Ireland and sell to Italians, not only is that not tax evasion, that is the point of the EU in the first place!

These companies have all had exactly the same tax arrangements for years and as Apple point's out in the article, have been repeatedly audited and passed. In fact Italy appears to have audited Apple three years in a row, which seems only explainable as harassment - tax audits are supposed to be semi-random spot checks to ensure compliance. If you pass an audit, getting audited the next year is just a waste of time and money for all concerned.

What's happening now is that a lot of governments around the world, having spent many decades promoting trade and economic integration when times were good and they had excessively cheap credit, now decided that maybe free trade isn't such a hot idea after all. After all, it might mean that other countries who you trade with end up more appealing to do business in. Ireland has had a long-standing policy of aggressively attracting international businesses with low tax rates, it's a very popular policy amongst the people in Ireland, and in fact until their government foolishly panicked and committed to a full bailout of their banks their economy was doing great. If the Italians are now mad about it, they have two choices:

1) Start rolling back the EU single market, then they can pass rules that say "if you want to sell stuff to Italians, you must run your business out of Italy and pay whatever taxes we want to do that" (of course this means some companies won't bother)

2) Deal with it and find other sources of revenue, whilst enjoying the fact that when Italian companies sell to the Irish, the Italians get to keep the corporate tax from that.

Right now governments are trying to do both simultaneously, which is why they grind to a halt in an internal deadlock of contradictions and you get bizarre setups like companies buying things from themselves.

Apple specifically will "solve itself" after a while because probably, Ireland will start making them corporation tax in Ireland safe in the knowledge that it's still more appealing than the alternatives. However this will not satisfy other members of the EU who dislike tax competition.

By the way, your post is very emotional. Tax should not be an emotional topic. Tax is (or rather should be) a technical matter in which people analyze the most efficient ways to raise the revenues governments need to function. Whether corporation tax is even a good idea at all is a matter of some debate in academic circles - the fact that you're trying to tax an entity that doesn't actually have any specific physical location is one reason why everyone ends up feeling like it's "not fair".

These companies have been running in Ireland for years, if it was illegal don't you think this would have been noticed by now? Here, read this and you may gain some clarity on the matter.

Except that if you RTFA it doesn't sound like tax evasion at all. It sounds like the Italians are broke and are harassing Apple because they don't like the fact that Apple bases itself in Ireland.

(Reuters) - U.S. tech giant Apple is under investigation in Italy for allegedly hiding 1 billion euros ($1.34 billion) from the local tax authority, two judicial sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters ..... The Italian subsidiary of Apple booked some of its profit through Irish-based subsidiary Apple Sales International (ASI), thus lowering its taxable income in Italy, the source said

"There is a global process under way and the Italian tax authority is one of the most active," said an Italian tax source. "In general, the focus is shifting towards multi-nationals that are able to lower their tax base through their international operations."

Apple is many things, but sloppy and ridden with fraud is not one of them. The Italian government, on the other hand ....

Get Poser, or something similar, and start replacing the face picks of all your contacts with pics of poser models asses selected for a best match to the contact's ass. Remember to find an appropriate image for companies and agencies. I'm thinking a Hydra would be appropriate for the NSA, Medusa for the FBI, Mantis for the CIA, etc.

Bonus points for doing r/g stereo of the images, or 3d if the phone supports that directly.

Or more likely, the warrant is checked ..... against a list of "superwarrants" that were fought in the FISA court and lost. Any API request that cites that warrant has to be processed so automating it, though it looks bad, doesn't really change anything.

Not illegal banks!

Yes, indeed. This meme that SSL is broken or useless is very damaging and needs to end.

The fact is that despite all the handwaving and noise, nobody has yet presented proof that a CA has been subverted by intelligence agencies, let alone knowingly. It's certainly possible that this has happened and one may think it is even likely, but in the absence of any proof it's hard to credibly argue the entire system is hosed.

The difficulty of course is finding such a proof. If a CA was found to have been routinely issuing certificates to intelligence agencies, it's very very likely that browser makers would revoke that CA and destroy the business. Their written policies are quite clear on this point and do not make governments special, that's why GoDaddy revoked LavaBit's SSL cert after learning the private key had been disclosed to the FBI. So far we don't have any evidence that the NSA or GCHQ were willing to risk destruction of a civilian business in order to reach one of their targets - though I guess there are still plenty of Snowden disclosures to come.

But even if there have been such certs issued, SSL is not useless. Firstly, it raises the complexity a lot. And secondly, there are initiatives underway to prevent subversion even by multi-billion-dollar intelligence agencies. For example the certificate transparency initiative is intending to upgrade the certificate format to contain a proof of inclusion in a public log. Browsers will start requiring the presence of these proofs in future, and thus it will no longer be possible to issue secret SSL certs that nobody can see except the victim. This is a large, complex upgrade of a massive infrastructure so it will take years, but eventually this system will raise the bar for SSL attackers to the point where they will either have to give up, or actually pass new laws that formally subvert SSL to the will of governments (at which point of course it does not matter if they are detected and there is no need to compromise CA's).

Which will happen is an open question at this point. However, Slashdot should get its ass into gear and switch on SSL and HSTS by default. Saying it's an option for logged in users just isn't good enough, especially when that option is so well buried I can't actually find it! SSL all the time should be the default, these days, there's just no reason not to anymore.

I don't remember Israel, Pakistan, or India threatening their neighbors or openly supporting terrorist groups. There is a little more reason to be concerned with Iran then there was with other countries when they got the nukes.

Wat?

I can't believe I just read that. If you don't remember these things, all it means is you need to revise your 20th century history again.

Let's review. Israel, in its extremely short life so far, has managed to obtain a global reputation for being insanely aggressive and warlike. The very creation of it led immediately to war with its new neighbours. Israel not only has nukes, but also created the Mossad, which openly assassinates people it doesn't like. Its leaders routinely threaten to attack or invade Iran if Israel's "friends" even think about being the slightest bit reasonable or diplomatic. Fear of what the completely crazy Israeli leadership might do if diplomacy fails is one of the reasons the rest of the world has implemented sanctions - it's seen as marginally preferable to Israel starting all out war in the middle east, which we know they wouldn't hesitate to do.

Pakistan and India have been at each others throats since the moment India became independent from the British Empire. The Partition was the rest of one of the most bloody civil wars in recent history. Since then both India and Pakistan have managed to obtain nukes, and their constant fighting over Kashmir is rated one of the most likely triggers for nuclear war. Each side routinely accuses the other of sponsoring terrorist attacks.

Of all the countries in the world you could have picked to try and make Iran look bad, you could not have chosen worse. Iran, despite the incredible amounts of shit they have had dumped on them in recent times, is not at all likely to invade a neighbour or randomly start a war in the middle east. I know this runs counter to US and Israeli propaganda, but there's no evidence at all that this is even slightly likely to happen - the Iranian leader has even said that war is un-Islamic, and he's really big on not doing things that are un-Islamic. Contrast this to the Israeli leaders who talk about war all the time.

BTW the story is crap. It's been obvious for ages that the sanctions have been put in place because America is Israeli's bitch and Europe is America's bitch. They aren't going to be removed, ever, because the people who control the sanctions regime are motivated by power, and only power. See how the moment it looked like there might be progress in Geneva the American's were running to Israel to re-assure them that the sanctions weren't going to be lifted no matter what happens (and that's despite them being struck down as illegal in European courts).

perhaps not the best marketing terminology for a vehicle, in that area of the world

Such cards have existed for many years. The NZ bus network is apparently using "MiFare Classic" which is very, very old now and is known to be weak. Designing better systems is no use if people don't upgrade to them.

Good dependency management keeps track of such things for you over the long term as well. apt-get _will_ tell you of libraries that were installed in support of applications that you've since removed, and gives you the ability to remove those libraries as well with the auto-remove function. It does not automatically remove them with the application, which can leave cruft on your system, but has the advantage that if you've found the library handy for some program you're writing, but haven't explicitly toled the package management system that your app depends on it, you're not breaking your own application.

And the dumb thing is, the whole point of Bitcoin is you don't need a bank. So why aren't these people using a local wallet like MultiBit?

i stopped reading there

you're a moron