Four EU Countries Seek Higher Taxes On Google and Amazon (reuters.com) 205
An anonymous reader quotes Reuters:
France, Germany, Italy and Spain want digital multinationals like Amazon and Google to be taxed in Europe based on their revenues, rather than only profits as now, their finance ministers said in a joint letter. France is leading a push to clamp down on the taxation of such companies, but has found support from other countries also frustrated at the low tax they receive under current international rules. Currently such companies are often taxed on profits booked by subsidiaries in low-tax countries like Ireland even though the revenue originated from other EU countries. "We should no longer accept that these companies do business in Europe while paying minimal amounts of tax to our treasuries," the four ministers wrote in a letter seen by Reuters.
Taxing revenue may actually be the best thing (Score:4, Interesting)
Companies don't pay corporate taxes. It gets passed on to customers as higher prices, to employees as lower wages, and to owners/stockholders as reduced dividends. You see, companies are just paper entities - they don't really exist. They're just a line a bunch of people (owners/stockholders and employees) draw around themselves so they can declare "we are working together." All the productivity, all the innovation, all the decisions are made by those people, not "the company". The company is just an inanimate banner, a flag they hold over their operations.
So you can't really tax a company. That's like impounding a car for assisting in a bank robbery, or sentencing a PC to prison for being used in a hack. Losing those items just turns into an additional financial expense for the people who used to own them. Likewise, corporate taxes are just additional financial expenses for the people involved with a company - owners/stockholders, employees, and customers.
Once you realize this, you realize how stupid it is to have a million different taxes for a million different things. It's a horribly inefficient way to collect tax revenue. The most efficient method would be to have a single tax which you assess against all people. If you believe in progressive taxation, then the obvious tax to keep is the income tax. Pretty much all other taxes* can be eliminated with no effect on the economy or tax revenue, other than vastly reducing the amount of money wasted on collecting taxes and forcing people/businesses to keep track of a million different taxes.
* (Behavior-modifying taxes would still be useful since their primary goal is not to collect revenue for the government. e.g. Fuel taxes to encourage energy efficiency, property taxes to prevent speculators from holding on to fallow land [latimes.com] which could otherwise be put to much better use.)
This also avoids the hypocrisy of saying you believe in no taxation without representation, then simultaneously wanting to tax corporations while believing they should have no role in government.
Re:Taxing revenue may actually be the best thing (Score:4, Informative)
It gets passed on to customers as higher prices
You're ignoring a little thing called 'the market' that may or may not allow them to rise prices. They can't rise prices if they can't sell enough stuff at those prices.
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Markets prevent one company from charging significantly more than its competitors for the same goods. The market generally doesn't prevent prices from going up if costs go up for all competitors, as they do with tax increases. In a competitive market, tax increases will usually get passed on alm
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Which is why governments can step in with subsidies, minimum and maximum price levels, tariffs and other protectionist measures.
There is no such thing as a free market, by the way. Theoretically such a thing contains an infinite number of sellers, an infinite number of buyers and no regulations whatsoever. So don't come and tell me you believe in letting the market decide when, for instance, you dislike the notion of child labour or slavery: The minute you decide to impart any kind of moral or regulation on
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A free market does not require an infinite number of buyers or sellers. Thats just garbage. A free market allows buyers and sellers to exchange goods and services without having to deal with a third party. Hence: "Free" from outside influences. Slavery doesn't count, because you need a third party to coerce the slave to work for no wage and against will. you can't do it, otherwise, someone else could come and enslave you.
Child labor on the other hand, if the child agrees to the wages: Imagine if for a momen
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More importantly, parents are generally only going to let their children engage in child labor if it is in the interest of the children; that is, if they are so poor that child labor is preferable to other options.
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They can, and consumers end up paying the price for it.
A free market is simply one in which any two people can engage in voluntary business transactions according to conditions that they choose. Free marke
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Oh, I see, you're Dutch, that explains your latent fascism. A shame you haven't learned from your history. I'm just putting it out there for all Dutch citizens on this thread.
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Sure it does: its called a consumption tax. Oh, and everyone uses google and amazon. I'm sorry, but they do. Your accountant who needs a laptop might buy it from Amazon. Their prices rise, so she has to charge you more. See? Lookup the monetary price system to learn more.
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Well, that would violate equal protection, but maybe Europeans don't care about that. In any case, so what? What does that have to do with what we were discussing?
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You don't see companies unilaterally return money on lower taxed items and they don't unilaterally increase prices on higher taxed items. That's just a convenient fiction for a certain type of man.
Glossary:
A certain type of man = evil person
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How do you know "you don't see" that?
"It varies"? What exactly "varies"?
Well, you leave me with no doubt as to what "type of man" you are: an economically illit
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You've seen differential responses to taxes / cost increases; it's your interpretation that's ludicrous.
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As to what varies. I'm talking about insurance, both cost to employee, cost to employer, coverage, etc... I've turned down a 20% pay raise because the new companies insurance would eat every penny and then some, pre-ACA.
educate yourself [openroadmedia.com]
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Dave Johnson is not an economist, he is a left wing activist.
So why not tax companies at 50%? At 100%? At 200%?
Thereby illustrating my point: if an employer provides you healthcare, they pay you less to make up for it.
Odd how that leaves out how government was responsible for the robber
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So why not tax companies at 50%? At 100%? At 200%?
Your strawman is showing.
Thereby illustrating my point: if an employer provides you healthcare, they pay you less to make up for it.
r Not true, this was just a classic small company, small pool, big cost vs. larger pool and lower cost. Companies pay the prevailing wage and cough up for health insurance because it's mostly expected. The fragmentation in the market makes it nearly impossible to compare plans between employers and I've clearly seen where one company is paying $20k of my insurance and another similar sized company is paying only $10k. Both plans had similar costs to me and similar coverage.
After I
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That's not a "strawman", it's a valid question: if you say "taxes are not passed onto consumers", why not increase taxes even more?
You gave it as an example in the context of a discussion about passing on costs. Now you say it was an example of big pool/small pool. Now, that's a straw man.
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Let me educate you about your stupid strawman argument.
Corporations are taxed on profits. Before profits are expenses. Expenses include salaries, inventory, depreciation, loans. Generally, none of this is taxed. Whatever you have left over, is profit. Profit is paid to shareholders, or reinvested, returned to customers in the form of lower prices, given to employees a
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Companies usually can't lower profits (they lose investors) or lower bonuses/salaries (they lose workers). But if they happen to be in a position to do either of those things, it means that groups like retirees or employees make less money, which effectively translates into higher prices for those groups. If companies expand slower, that means lower supply, and hence higher prices. And i
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No, it's what you are preaching: strong government intervention in the economy and services like healthcare.
Where the hell did you get this from? I'm just saying taxes are too low and should be better targeted at companies that make money in a given area.
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You wrote: "This is why single payer makes sense."
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But the point I was making was how companies vary in how they pass costs to consumers or employees. One company might contribute 75% of premiums which is, for example, $500. Another company might contribute 50% which is $800. The insurance market is crazy. It only exists because of government inter
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We have a huge public health care system in the US, and far from delivering "lower overhead, standardized costs", it costs about 3x as much as the British NHS. If the US lowered the costs of Medicare/Medicaid to that of the UK, we could already cover everybody out of existing contributions. Forcing
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Yes, they vary in how they pass it on: some companies pay you more and reduce benefits, other companies pay less and increase benefits. Some companies lay off part of their workforce.
Likewise, when you tax products, some companies explicitly raise prices, other companies lower quality or decrease quantities, and yet others just get out of the market. Economically, all of those amount to "raising prices".
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You guys act like this has never happened in the history of corporations.
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FTL; "Coverage is universal for all legal residents. About 85 percent of the population is covered by social health insurance and 10 percent by substitutive private health insurance. The remainder (e.g., soldiers, policemen) are covered under special programs. Undocumented immigrants are covered by social security in case of illness. All employed citizens (and other groups such as pensioners) earning less than €4,237.50 (US$5,422.80) per month (€50,850.00 [US$65,074.00] per yea
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I'm not sure what you're trying to say there. "Social health insurance" is still a system administered by private insurance companies and paid for by individual premiums; it's simply highly regulated. And "mandatorily covered" means that you are required by law to buy coverage under certain conditions (and under other conditions, you
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Profits may go down slightly, but there usually is very little room there; that is, most companies operate close to the minimum profit margins at which it is worthwhile for them to stay in business.
I was carefully stating this: Companies usually can't lower profits (they lose investors) or lower bonuses/salaries (they lose workers). But if they happen to be in a
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Yes. The German system delivers that.
The ACA and the crony capitalist crap that Democrats have been proposing as "single payer" does not.
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Apple is a luxury brand with a monopoly, catering mostly to rich, spoiled millennials.
Most businesses cannot. Unlike you, I actually checked the data. I suggest you do it: you'll be surprised (if you actually manage to understand it).
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In any case: https://economix.blogs.nytimes... [nytimes.com]
"Probably most people assume that the corporate income tax is largely paid by consumers of its products or services. That is, they assume that although the tax is nominally levied on the corporation as a whole, in fact the burden of the tax is shifted onto customers in the form of higher prices.
All economists reject that idea. "
From Econ101 at Carnegie Mellon University. [cmu.edu]:
Myth: An
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Turning the ACA into the German system would require massive cuts in services and coverage, eliminating Medicare/Medicaid entirely, as well as giving up on the kind of premises that the ACA is based on (equality, redistribution, using healthcare for social policy). I don't see any chance that Democrats are going to let that happen.
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The CMU statement is technically true but trivial; when people say that "companies pass on taxes as higher prices", they are implicitly talking about fairly inelastic demand curves. For elastic demand curves, it is true that prices don't go up much, but that doesn't mean that companies eat the difference. I leave it as an exercise to you to figure out what happens in that case. Apparently, such simple economic reasoning is beyond the people teaching Econ101 at CMU. As for the NYT quote, it's just ridiculous
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A tax on revenue is otherwise known as a sales tax.
That pretty much sums it up, since their revenue primarily comes from sales. A tax is a cost to the company, just like any other, and will be rolled into prices.
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If you believe in progressive taxation, then the obvious tax to keep is the income tax.
That income tax is progressive is a huge myth. Most of the real wealth is not from people trading their hours for money. It might be slightly more progressive than sales tax but that's about it. If you really want a progressive tax then you need to tax assets or net worth. A yearly tax of 5% of net worth could fully fund the entire federal government with money to spare. Another progressive tax would be to tax the movement of money. By my calculations, the USA could replace all our tax revenue with a
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If you put a tax on stock trades, it would reduce the amount of trading, making your initial revenue calculations wrong.
It *might* but a $200 tax on a 1 million dollar transaction will likely not have much effect on volume. There is likely other things in the transaction that introduce more friction than this. Same with a 20 cent tax on a $1k transaction. This is likely not enough to actually change trading patterns.
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No, not might. Will. A $200 tax on a $1m transaction will stop if the transaction was done to earn $200 in profit. Look up high frequency trading to learn more.
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No, not might. Will. A $200 tax on a $1m transaction will stop if the transaction was done to earn $200 in profit. Look up high frequency trading to learn more.
If someone is doing a $1M trade to make $200 then they are likely doing a MITM attack that shouldn't be legal anyways. For the average person buying $1M of stocks to actually own those stocks, $200 isn't going to matter. Even for a day trader, the stock would only have to move that same 0.02% (0.0002) to get back to even. Most stocks fluctuate 10 times that amount every minute. A day trader isn't going to do a trade that it expects to only move 0.02% (0.0002).
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A tax on revenue is otherwise known as a sales tax.
No it's not. Revenues is more sources than just sales. Sales tax does not apply to investment income, loans, IP licensing costs and many other revenue streams.
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If you think you can tax revenue, your smoking something good. What would your tax rate be? Now take every industry with margins lower than that and wipe them out. Or, raise the prices across the board of every single item you ever buy or sell, or pay for, or charge for by that amount. Now, add in a 5% overhead for actually calculating and collecting those funds to the cost of running the agency assigned with such a task.
20 percent VAT (Score:2)
If you think you can tax revenue, your smoking something good. What would your tax rate be?
A typical value added tax in a European country is in the neighborhood of 20 percent.
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Do you know how many people "own" your average company?
You should read "The Big Change" by Frederick Lewis Allen so you can see how the real world works, although it's even more complicated now.
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Your an imbecile who's price wouldn't be worth shit.
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*You're
** whose
*** prize
Are you sure he's the imbecile?
wrong way to do this (Score:2)
The best way is to drop all corporate taxes for a company that makes/produces local goods. And then put on a subtractive VAT on nearly everything, except create an additive VAT for imported parts. With this approach, it means that anything that is moved from wholesale to ret
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Countries would probably have to drop out of the WTO to do that. It's effectively a tariff, and I would think they would be inundated with complaints trying to enact something like that. I'm not an international trade lawyer or anything though.
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And many of those have sales taxes on TOP of that.
And they STILL want to charge corporate taxes to companies outside of their region.
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Sure. Not to be snarky but is that related to my comment? I'm not seeing the connection.
Um (Score:2)
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They aren't taxed in the US. They avoid taxes everywhere.
Anyway, the EU has a right to collect taxes on business done in the EU. If the US taxes that business as well then Google needs to take it up with the US government.
Re:Those profits are taxed in the US (Score:4, Informative)
The most ironic thing is that the US taxman actually goes after american citizens that live outside the US for purposes of collecting taxes. It's the only country (with Ethiopia if I'm not mistaken) to do that. But it doesn't go after American companies that stash money outside the US and that should pay the taxes in their own damn country.
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The way it should happen would be to simply eliminate "imaginary property" altogether. But I bet they would still figure out some other way of performing this "Hollywood accounting". Probably much like Hollywood itself does, they claim "marketing expenses" which are curiously always enough to erase any profit they made.
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Giving in to the corporations is not the answer (Score:3)
Your first two paragraphs are really about transfer pricing used for tax avoidance. That would be fixable if there were sufficient political will, but there isn't. Most transfer pricing used for this is immediately apparent when you examine common ownership of the licensor and licensee. This is not hidden because it is not illegal, in fact it is usually listed on the 10k forms public corps file with SEC in the US. This is why stock prices do not reflect the low profit levels of companies using this tacti
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Also - taxing revenue would essentially remove all profit from their balance sheets. Essentially dooming them as functioning companies.
Taxing revenue at the same rate as profit would bankrupt them but because revenue is usually significantly higher than profit, you would likely tax it at a different rate. The only problem I see with this is that different industries have drastically different amounts of profit for the same amount of revenue. I think a better solution might be to tax profits of international companies based on the percentage of business done in that country. So if a company has a profit of 20M and 20% of their revenue is
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The big problem here is Facebook EU (using a spurious example) pays Facebook Ireland a huge fee for licensing certain proprietary technologies. Facebook EU therefore makes no profit, while Facebook Ireland makes a huge profit, but Ireland has low taxation so they pay far less overall.
You can substitute Microsoft, Google or whatever company you want here. This is how they play the game.
Which is why you short circuit the game. Take whichever entity of Facebook that is actually making the profit to court for tax invasion and say because 10% of their customers are in the France that they are required to pay taxes on 10% of that profit or they stop operating in France. It doesn't matter if that profit is from server farms, Intellectual Property, or some other made up BS. Everyone knows what the profit is. They are a publicly traded company and there aren't shares of Ireland Facebook and F
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The big problem here is Facebook EU (using a spurious example) pays Facebook Ireland a huge fee for licensing certain proprietary technologies. Facebook EU therefore makes no profit, while Facebook Ireland makes a huge profit, but Ireland has low taxation so they pay far less overall.
Spot on. There are always problems with any kind of tax system. Whatever you tax, you'll get less of. And the taxpayers will willingly spend $100 million in legal fees creating goofy corporate structures to avoid $1 billion in taxes.
As near as I can tell, the fine finance ministers don't actually care about whether taxing profit or revenue is ethically right, or causes less distortion of the economy. They just want more money. They could just raise the tax rate on profits or muddle the issue by talking abou
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I think VAT is supposed to be charged at the point of sale. I say supposed because at least Amazon exploited some loophole at least a couple years ago where they basically charged customers the VAT in their area but actually paid a much lower rate. Which is not supposed to be how it happens.
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So you are assuming these companies are being taxed adequately in the US. Interesting.
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Amazon pays sales tax on total revenue, not profit, in all 50 United States. And presumably (correct me if I'm wrong) pay the applicable VAT on all items sold in Europe. This, by the way, is one major way to stop companies from playing silly games. Let's compare for a moment:
(1) Tax consumption: reasonably straightforwards. If an item is sold for X, the tax is some rate time X, perhaps depending the category of goods. A VAT is almost as simple and can be considered in the same category. There is less[1] sco
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Winning at racing to the bottom isn't exactly innovation. Free trade should really be about trade, not services, not company taxation and certainly not foreign investment.
Unfortunately it isn't, free trade is about destroying national sovereignty and reimplementing feudalism.
Re: EU Countries Seek Higher Taxes On (Score:5, Insightful)
everything
Yep. It's one of the reasons why our infrastructure isn't falling apart, why we rank very high in satisfaction, health, happiness, why internet is blazingly fast and dirt cheap, why public transport can be described as excellent...
Governments aren't for profit entities funnelling cash to a couple of shareholders.
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Governments aren't for profit entities funnelling cash to a couple of shareholders, openly and with any sort of transparency or accountability.
FTFY. I broadly agree with you, but pretending like our current governments aren't corrupt is pretty naive. Name your country and we can provide appropriate citations.
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You think an advanced society has people arrested for criticizing Islam?
Since some loopy nuts believe that censoring speech and having blasphemy laws is the sign of an advanced society I guess so. Myself? If your society has blasphemy laws you're not. And if you're using those laws to protect only one religion you're regressing as a society.
If your "advanced society" can't stand criticism, it's sure not advanced. And if you've got people promoting it, then you've got social rot. Something that most of the west has seen a resurgence in, in the last decade or so.
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No country has shown more social rot than the United States.
You've got no idea on what you're even saying. Go, travel the world. Let me know when you hit a country like Japan where being homeless is so stigmatized that you're considered 'less of a person.' Go and hit european countries that turn around and bury mass-rape gangs of their own citizens by immigrants because the police and councils are afraid of being labeled racist. Or where news stories about grenade attacks as the question 'are grenade attacks the new normal here.'
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Citation? It's hard to evaluate when you don't specify.
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Asking someone to cite their claims is a good thing. I don't think admonishing someone for doing something appropriate will really help them to become the better person you want them to be.
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You often ask for citations, but rarely give them.
That's because he also often criticises and rarely makes claims of his own. But it is the claims which require the proof not the question of validity.
Become a better person. Learn how to self-reflect. Learn critical logic.
The irony is so thick you can cut it with a knife.
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But when he does, boy does he do it!
Islamists are responsible for about 5% of terror attacks in the US and 2% in Europe. [slashdot.org]
Re: EU Countries Seek Higher Taxes On (Score:5, Informative)
I am in Germany right now and your statement is complete and utter bullshit. You can say almost anything you want in Germany. You can't do Nazi things for historical reasons but people do talk about it without any problems at all. People can and do criticize islam along with pretty much everything else. Of course if you criticize an entire religion you should not expect many people to agree with you or continue to provide a platform for your speech.
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You can say almost anything you want and I don't have to agree with it. You are reading your own views into what I have written.
However, saying that all of Islam has a problem because of what a tiny minority of believes does is incorrect and unhelpful. There are christian religious extremists, buddhist religious extremists etc. We also have political extremists of many different viewpoints that use violence. Liberals are not bad because of the antifa groups and conservatives are not bad because of things li
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Except there is no hell in judaism and it is a non-proselytizing religion and atheism is not a religion.
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Those bastards? They're almost as bad as the Stasi!
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The Germans are still looking at WWII bunkers that are too expensive to remove.
IIRC the spent millions cutting windows into the one in downtown Hamburg. But it's still an obvious 'highrise bunker'.
Just one of the downsides of building everything to last forever. Costs a fortune to build, cost another when you need something different after 20 years.
Plywood? You haven't seen recent American construction. They hardly use chipboard anymore. Too expensive. Just use zig zaged plastic strapping, cover that
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You could enter most new homes with a utility knife.
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That is how new stucco construction has been done for about 10+ years. No siding on the outside, just drywall and a layer of stucco on the outside of the stick wall. Supported by plastic strapping.
Chicken wire was part of the stucco process before they removed the plywood. Not a good faraday cage unless grounded and interconnected.
You also see aluminum radiant barriers on roof sheeting. It's amazing you can get any bars insides some structures.
You'd have to kick your way through the outer layer, but
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If there is a trade war nothing of value will be lost. The only thing you Americans produce are mass murder weapons. You can keep them.
Yes, which are pretty much the only thing that prevent Putin from doing the same to EU as he did with Crimea.
Food ? Don't need, we have our own (real genuine, not hormone or genetically modified shit).
Yes, let me quote the NY Times:
Without a trace of embarrassment, a spokeswoman for Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, admitted that the first ministerâ(TM)s science adviser had not been consulted because the decision âoewasnâ(TM)t based on scientific evidence.â
Who are you screwing with?
Luxury items ? Don't need, we have our own.
European TV, American TV, all made in China.
Tourism ? You have nothing to offer besides The Grand Canyon and Yellowstone Park. Museums ?
Right. Oviously never
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Maybe the whole EU thing wasn't such a great idea?
I've got an alternative solution, get your government to lower its tax rate to a reasonable level or go broke. If they refuse, move to Ireland, vote with your feet.
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That's not how amazon works. Amazon gives the seller a "credit" for the amount of shipping regardless of what the actual shipping is. That credit is sometimes more and sometimes less than what it costs to ship it. If it's less, the seller just has to eat it. If the credit is more (and it likely would be for multiple items shipped together), then amazon doesn't keep that, amazon gives that to the seller who may or may not decide to ship the items in the same box. Strangely, the credit the seller gets is
Media and non-media shipping work differently (Score:2)
That's not how amazon works. Amazon gives the seller a "credit" for the amount of shipping regardless of what the actual shipping is.
Are you referring to media products (books, music CDs, DVDs, etc.) or non-media products?
It would work much better if the seller could actually set the shipping rate and give discounts for multiple items shipped together like you can on ebay.
Amazon works this way for professional sellers of non-media products. This R/C car dealer in Fort Wayne, Indiana [amazon.com], gave discounts for combined shipping last I checked.
To encourage large orders (Score:2)
Shouldn't shipping be free or at least some low nominal value?
The "low nominal value" is for economy shipping methods, such as Parcel Select or UPS Ground, assuming the total of items from a single seller meets a minimum size. An order that doesn't meet the minimum size incurs a fee because small orders are proportionally more expensive per item to ship. So does one for which a faster shipping method is selected without an annual subscription to faster shipping at that address.
If you buy from a brick and mortar retailer in your city, it has already paid for shipping from the distributor/manufacturer's city to your city.
But not to your door.
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Yet you just posted this in the World Wide Web didn't you? Guess where THAT was invented.
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I believe this is EU member countries seeking to change their tax laws, not a tax imposed by the EU.
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Yeah fuck civilisation and fuck those who understand that civilisation isn't free.
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Well that was a fairly mindless and pointless anti-EU rant. This has got nothing to do with the EU budget nor Brussels levying taxes across the EU, but individual countries trying to claw back some money for their own coffers, so your silly angst should be aimed at Paris, Berlin, Rome and Madrid (and the rest).