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The problem is that multinational corporations can devise complicated ways to avoid paying taxes in the countries where they do business by exploiting tax havens, as Apple did in Ireland.

Amazon has a huge business in the UK with offices, staff, stock and warehouses, but Amazon UK doesn't sell stuff. You are actually buying UK goods from UK warehouses with UK delivery etc but the money goes straight to Amazon EU Sarl in Luxembourg, where it has a sweetheart tax deal.

So Amazon exploits the whole UK social system of education, health services, roads, police etc etc without paying the UK government for the benefits. This is really bad for the UK and other countries except Luxembourg.

Meanwhile, Amazon EU Sarl reduces its taxes by paying Amazon Europe Holding Technologies SCS - a "non-resident" company -- hundreds of millions of euros for "intellectual property" rights that are basically untaxed (Amazon is paying itself), and the money gets spirited back to the USA.

The cost of "intellectual property" is really just a made-up number. What is Amazon charging itself vast amounts of money for when its UK website and business processes are basically the same as its American and other websites?

The whole thing may be legal but it's basically a fraud, and the EU ordered EU ordered Amazon to repay €250m in “illegal tax advantages”. Which is still chickenfeed for a company of Amazon's size and wealth.

It's highly likely that European countries will introduce a "digital tax" on turnover to stop this kind of cheating. I expect Americans will get angry if or when that happens, but in the long run, we don't have an alternative. Infrastructure is expensive, and the money should come from the people who are benefiting from it.

In the US, of course, Amazon gets tax breaks from people who want Amazon investment. New Jersey offered $7bn of tax incentives in its bid for Amazon's "second headquarters".

If companies like Amazon actually paid the taxes required by law that would be nice. Instead they have armies of people finding wholly artificial ways to legally avoid paying those taxes.

You can be infected without having a fever. That's one of the problems with coronavirus.

Knowing you have the virus won't save you, of course, but you will be able to react accordingly. That will include trying not to infect anyone else....

Agreed, but unless you can self-isolate, it's not going to last very long.

If you got tested weekly, the costs would soon mount up.....

The marginal cost of verification could be zero. All Twitter has to do is to get together with Facebook, Google et al and agree to support a number of approved independent identity systems such as Yoti [1]. That uses a combination of government documents (eg passports) and biometrics.

Basically, users would be able to sign up for a sort of "digital passport" ID that would, in the long term, be accepted by governments and most websites. Enough people might find it convenient enough to sign up.

Twitter already allows you to block all users who have not registered a phone number and not uploaded a photo or whatever. I used these settings. They actually do remove a lot of bots and bad players. Again, in the long term, Twitter would give people the option to see only verified accounts.

I really wouldn't care if it meant I only saw tweets from a relatively small number of verified accounts. It might be more like Twitter in its first half dozen years, when it was much more engaging and fun than it is today.

[1] https://www.yoti.com/

Yoti also works offline. For example, you can use it to prove that you are over 18 without giving away your name or other irrelevant information.

In the EU, free (at point of use) healthcare is available to all residents, including the unemployed. In several countries, you can get free treatment immediately even if you are not a resident.

That's a lot different from the USA, where tens of thousands of people die from lack of health insurance, and probably hundreds of thousands are bankrupted by the healthcare they get.

A quarter or more Americans put off seeking medical treatment because of the cost. By the time they seek treatment, it may be too late. I'm reminded of a carpenter who won $1 million and said he could finally go to see a doctor. He died a few weeks later from cancer.

A lot of Americans are one accident or illness away from financial ruin and poverty.

For all their problems, Europeans are a lot better off than this.

More than 26 000 Americans die each year because of lack of health insurance https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2323087/

New study finds 45,000 deaths annually linked to lack of health coverage https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/09/new-study-fin...

The Americans dying because they can't afford medical care https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/07/americans-he...

More Americans Delaying Medical Treatment Due to Cost https://news.gallup.com/poll/269138/americans-delaying-medic...

Medical Bankruptcy: Still Common Despite the Affordable Care Act https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2018.3049...

Medical Bankruptcy Is Killing The American Middle Class https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/medical-bankruptcy-killing-a...

New York carpenter who won $1 million lottery prize dies of stage-4 cancer weeks later https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/02/02/lottery...

N.Y. man dies from cancer 3 weeks after winning $1M lottery https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-...

If the "known eugenicist" is who I think it is, then he isn't.

The general idea, as explained by the late Hans Rosling, is that if you educate people (including girls) and help them to lead better lives then they will naturally have fewer children. They do this of their own free will.

Rosling says: "only by raising the living standards of the poorest can we check population growth". [1]

If there is a very high probability that half your children will die before they grow up, then it makes sense to have twice as many children. If you expect every child to grow up and thrive, you won't do that.

This has already happened in most developed countries, with no eugenics and no eugenicists involved. Most people in the west now have fewer children than their grandparents had.

I really don't see a problem with less-developed countries enjoying exactly the same sort of progress as we've already had.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_global_population_gro...

One of the nice things was that you could run Windows NT on a DUAL PROCESSOR PC with two Alpha chips. This was such an attractive idea I thought of buying one. However, when I did a very quick trial, it didn't make any noticeable difference to my very simple workloads (mostly Microsoft Office).

DEC sold its StrongARM (ARM-based) business to Intel in 1997, before DEC was taken over by Compaq in 1998. It resulted in Intel's XScale business, which it later sold to Marvell.

Compaq abandoned DEC's Alpha for the HP/Intel Itanic, so Intel didn't get an Alpha business. However, Compaq sold the Alpha IP to Intel in 2001, before the HP takeover in 2002.

I'd be interested to know what happened to the Alpha architects, Richard L. Sites and Richard T. Witek. A quick search doesn't find anything interesting.

I remember there was a breakaway of DEC engineers founding a small chip design company, but can't remember what it was called.

When it launched in 2001...the idea that a massive array of cheap x86 processors will outperform enterprise-class servers simply hadn't occurred to most people yet

The idea was certainly around in the early-to-mid 1980s, when some former Intel engineers founded Sequent.

The Balance 8000, released in 1984, supported up to 12 processors on dual-CPU boards, while the Balance 21000, released in 1986, supported up to 30.

I interviewed the founder, Casey Powell, and he was explicit about multiple Intel microprocessors replacing large systems. He was targeting minicomputers at the time, of course, but we all anticipated that bigger sets of more powerful CPUs would eventually surpass even the biggest "big iron".

Powell was a great guy. However, his company got taken over by IBM. In the end, he didn't get to change the world.

"It's hard to be the little guy on the block and have really great technology and get beaten, just because the other guy is big." https://www.cnet.com/news/sequent-was-overmatched-ceo-says/

Belated reply (Christmas!)

the failure was not necessarily technical

Well, that was exactly my point ;-)

If you only look at the technical issues, ur doin it rong.

I use Everything all day every day and it's brilliant at what it does. However, it's not Google Desktop Search, which I sorely miss...

(1) Cost of software is relatively small compared with the cost of employing the people who use it.

(2) Cost of software is relatively small compared with the cost of retraining staff and changing business workflows and processes to cope with different software.

(3) Changing to new software is relatively simple compared with the problems of making all your staff, your contractors and your suppliers change to new software.

(4) Even if changing to new software was relatively simple and cheap, there would be massive risks in doing it. If you are designing nuclear power stations, nuclear submarines, skyscrapers, bridges or whatever, the cost of mistakes can run into the billions, or be fatal for a significant number of people.

(5) Bonus point: making this kind of switch could take a decade and could end up not saving you any money (cf Munich trying to switch to open source). Not many CEOs will attempt it because they are more focused on the next quarter's results. Anyway, in many if not most companies, the benefits -- if any -- would accrue to whoever the-next-CEO-after-the-next-CEO happens to be. And who really cares about that?

It's hard enough to get most people to change their email client or their text editor or whatever when the alternatives are free and the real-world risks are negligible. Getting them to change the software on which their whole business survival is based is another matter.

Moral: changing business software is not as simple as it seems if you only look at the software and don't look at the whole business plus the whole industry infrastructure of related businesses. It's never as simple as people think.

They both got ones with 128GB drives which has turned into massive frustration. But we will ignore that for now.

Please can you un-ignore that in one sentence? ;-)

From a polemic in The Spectator:

"There is a huge cast of well-paid people, from management consultants to economic advisers, whose entire salaries are earned by ripping out Chesterton’s fences. Interestingly, these are mostly male-dominated industries (men are more prone to narrow systematising than women). Silicon Valley, which is overwhelmingly male, is possibly the worst offender of all. The very fact that a fence is over ten years old, requires atoms in its manufacture or creates employment for human beings is reason enough for them to want to get rid of it."

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/09/chestertons-fence-and-th...

Search the page and you'll find several mentions of Brave.

What I want to know is why someone would pick Brave instead of the Epic Privacy Browser...

... though personally, I think it's far better to support Firefox as it's now the only viable alternative browser that isn't based on Chrome.

Chrome is now so dominant that people can just ignore open web standards and develop for Chrome instead. This is a Bad Thing.

Why Brave rather than the Epic Privacy Browser?

(They are both based on Chromium....)

No. Google's OneBox, Ask’s Smart Answers, Microsoft’s Instant Answers, and Yahoo Shortcuts all existed at least two years before DDG was even founded in 2008.

Also, DDG's "Instant Answers are open source and are maintained on GitHub, where anyone can build or work on them". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

It's not the same sort of massive web-scraping click-stealing operation as Google's OneBox.

No, uBlock is not the same as uBlock Origin.

Quote:

In July 2018, uBlock.org was acquired by AdBlock,[19] and began allowing "Acceptable Ads",[20] a program run by Adblock Plus that allows some ads which are deemed "acceptable", and the publisher pays Adblock Plus.[21]

EndQuote

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin

From Wikipedia:

So, as of May 2019, in the 34 states that have set a marriage age by statute, the lower minimum marriage age when all exceptions are taken into account, are:

    2 states have a minimum age of 14: Alaska and North Carolina.
    4 states have a minimum age of 15.
    20 states have a minimum age of 16.
    8 states have a minimum age of 17.

-- End of quotation --

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_age_in_the_United_Sta...

I'm not an American, so I don't understand why you have not fixed this obvious problem.

Let all your colleagues know that you only ready emails at specific times, eg start of day, after lunch, end of day (replace with actual hours if possible).

And if there's something urgent inbetween times, they have to call you.

It worked for me ;-)

True, but the browser brought a GUI and ease of use. More people could use a browser to run ftp than could -- or at least, would -- run ftp.

Seconded. Everything is brilliant if you need to find files by name, not contents....

He's CTO of Azure and therefore a VIP at Microsoft...

In his spare time he's also managed to write three novels.

Without giving them plenty of time to pullout?

These things take a long time. Google was abusing its search monopoly before the EU started a seven-year investigation that resuled in a $2.7 billion fine ... which it is now appealing.

Google settled with the US in 2013. It agreed to change some of its search practices and got away without a fine.

I'd be surprised if Google didn't know it was abusing its search monopoly. I'd assume it calculated that it was more profitable to keep doing it until compelled to stop.

Either way, a seven-year investigation provides plenty of time to prepare for exit strategies, if required, and it would grossly incompetent not to have prepared for them.

That's not what's happening.

A decade ago, IBM had 130,00 staff in the USA and very few in India.

Today, IBM has 130,00 staff in India and it refuses to say how many are left in the USA.

It's not really a question of saving a bit of money (20%, say) on American employees. IBM is just shipping jobs to India at a terrific rate because the cost of employing Indians is, in comparison, very very low.

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/ibm-shifts-center-of-g...

IBM is just getting rid of Americans with high salaries, health insurance and pensions and replacing them with much cheaper workers in India. It now has far more workers in India than it does in the USA.

Of course, IBM is also destroying the skills and experience that customers are paying them to provide, but it's happy to get a short-term gain and ignore the long-term pain. The people in charge will have stashed away their millions and left before most of the ordure hits the rotating device.

Bear in mind that IBM's turnover today is less than it was in 2000, and it's had five or six years of annual decline. As a company, it's failing badly, so perhaps it's unrealistic for it plan for a future that might not happen.

PCs often (mostly?) ship with third-party anti-virus software because AV companies pay them to install it.

I've never heard a Sony audio product that actually sounded bad, and I've owned a lot of them, including earbuds, headphones, MP3 players, cassette players, audio systems, Blu-ray, SACD and MiniDisc ;-)

They haven't all been the best sounding, or even the best value, but they've all had decent sound quality. Some of them have had exceptional sound quality.

There's a much better framework for understanding this stuff in the concept of the Whole Product.

The Whole Product is not just the core product. You have to add on all the things like reliability, service and support (the expected product), its expansion capabilities (the augmented product), and its potential for future development (the potential product) to get "the whole product".

If you just look at the core product, you are very likely to go wrong, because having a technologically superior core product does not mean you have a better Whole Product. (See cassette tape vs DAT, Windows vs OS/2 and many more.)

The Whole Product concept was popularized by Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado, which were seminal books at places like Netscape. Before that, the key idea was TAM, the Technology Adoption Model, pioneered by Professor Everett Rogers in Diffusion of Innovations in 1962.

Also because Microsoft licensed the OS to hundreds of PC clone manufacturers. Amiga was a closed proprietary system.