Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Re: Catalonia Government is spreading false information

democracy. Democracy means respecting the others, and using laws to change the laws.

jordipalet,

Democracy is about losers as well as winners. And minorities as much as majorities.

So democracy only works if the loser accepts that they've lost, and that this was fair. In the long term it also only works if the majority respect minorities. If they don't, then the minority who can never win (because they're a minority) may decide that the system is stacked against them - and so they stop believing in it. This may result in mass non-voting, civil disobedience, people refusing to pay taxes, even violence, terrorism etc.

What it is very unlikely to lead to, is those people believing in the system, or that it has their best interests at heart.

So if the Spanish government refuses to deal with Catalan national feeling by legal/political means and negotiate, what will happen next? So far we've had the regional politicians attempt to solve this by getting people to vote. Pro-independence parties got a majority last election. So you can't claim there isn't a large amount of support for the idea.

If Spain will not allow any legal means to deal with this issue, and people believe passionately in it, then they will call those laws unjust. And they will break them.

This will be the Spanish government's fault.

Therefore the Spanish government must do something else. While a majority of Catalan people are still likely to vote to remain Spanish.

No. I think it's just a clash of competing ideas. If you're spanish and reasonably nationalist, maybe you feel that Catalan secession is an attack on you. I mean Catalonia hasn't been an independent state in a very long time.

A bit like some English people took the idea of Scottish independence somewhat personally - and certain people in the EU have reacted to Brexit. Perhaps some combination of hurt pride, hurt feelings, feeling of an attack on what you thought was a common group.

But if you're Catalan and don't feel Spanish, this makes no sense. If you can persuade enough Catalan people to agree with you, then what business is this of the rest of Spain? You're offski, and any attempt by them to keep you in the union is basically colonialism.

Then I'm sure there's loads of people in the middle. Who'll be the ones who decide in the end. Will the rest of Spain continue to just say no, and ignore the problem? If they do will most Catalans accept it, as they have much internal autonomy and independence isn't worth the hassle? Or will things turn nasty - and the extremists on both side poison the relationship to such an extent that secession becomes inevitable?

Terrorism is illegal. Campaigning for Catalan secession is not.

I agree that the referendum itself is illegal - which gives the Spanish government the right to take action against the Catalan regional government. But it doesn't give them the right to close down websites discussing the referendum.

Re: Catalonia Government is spreading false information

This is politics. The law matters, but is not a shield a government can always hide behind. Particularly if the government has the power to change that law.

If a law is unjust (or even seen by a large number of people as unjust), and you refuse to even negotiate on changing that law - then what are people supposed to do? The Catalans are not a majority in Spain. All they can do is gather the biggest democratic mandate they can (their regional elections) and see what happens.

If the Spanish government is unwilling to even discuss the matter, then what you are saying is that there is literally nothing the Catalans can do. Unjust laws have often been removed because of campaigns of non-violent protest against them. Which often involve breaking them.

The next step then depends on how strongly people care about the issue. If they care deeply, and are unable to remove what they see as an unjust law by non-violent means, what will they do next? Go home and forget all about it? Or will some resort to violent means? And if a government stifles all legal protest, then also the non-violent ilegal type, what should it expect next?

ESmub68,

I didn't want Scotland to leave the UK. But it turns out that about 45% of Scots currently do. Refusing to have a referendum was not going to make that number smaller. So we had one. The discussion all came out in the open.

Because the result was close, that won't be the end of it. After a few years things may settle down, we'll probably have to have another referendum and maybe that will settle matters, as it did in Quebec.

But if Scots don't feel that democracy is working for them, because they're in a country whose institutions they don't think meet their needs - then they should be independent. I think the UK has given them about as much autonomy as our system can cope with. If they still decide they need more, then we're either going to have to totally re-write our constitution (and maybe create an unwanted system of regional government in England) or they will decide to separate.

Which would be sad. But is not rebellion. It is their democratic right.

Catalonia has never been a Spanish colony. Although in lilving memory people have been imprisoned for speaking the language. By the Spanish government who banned that language.

Do you think this is likely to make Catalan people feel:

a) warm and fuzzy feelings for the Spanish government, or

b) distrust and possible dislike?

Hmmmmm? I wonder...

So question, what do you do about it? If Spain refuses to engage with reasonable Catalan requests for discussions on a referendum on independence, then what will happen next? Will the Catalans decide that Spain are right, and their national feeling is just something they've imagined? Or will this unite the majority who don't want independence with the minority who currently do?

If Spain forces Catalans to be part of Spain when a large majority don't want to be, what is the difference then whether you call them a colony or not?

The sensible thing to do is to negotiate now. If Spain acts reasonably now, then everyone may get some of what they want. The secessionists get a referendum which they lose fair-and-square, and Spain gets to stay a whole country.

The alternative is far more uncertain.

ESmub68,

Your english is fine. It's difficult working in another language.

And I understand your point, about the Spanish constitution. BUT, what if your constitution disagrees with international law?

Chapter 1 of the UN Charter calls for the right of self-determination of peoples.

That's a foundational document of international law, which Spain is signed up to. So if a large majority of Catalan people don't want to be Spanish, what then? What gives the rest of Spain the right to tell them?

Not that this is simple. It's fair to set rules for referenda. But is it really acceptable to just say no? If Spain uses force to stop Catalans expressing their freedom, at what point does that make Catalonia just a colony of the rest of Spain?

True, but unhelpful.

If enough people have a reasonable political ambition, just making it illegal doesn't work. The Spanish government can stick their fingers in their ears while the pressure for a referendum grows, and hope that it all blows over as the economy continues to recover - but that's a high risk ploy. Support for secession may just continue to grow, until it's unstoppable.

Or they can act like a mature democracy, and have talks about it, followed by a referendum.

One problem is that this isn't like Scotland. There's no economic debate here, Catalonia pays in a huge amount more than it receives from the Spanish treasury. They're one of the economic power-houses of the country. So they've already got plenty of local autonomy - meaning it may come down to the rest of Spain accepting they've got to take a little less for the central pot, or risk losing it all. Or it may just be that having a referendum lances the boil - and the Catalans want to feel they've been listened to.

Re: FC Barcelona

What about creating a joint Catalan-Scottish league? Solves both problems.

Re: re. Scotland had its referendum. With few problems

So what exactly happened when the subject was floated a few months back, that Scotland should vote for independence again before the UK jumps the EU boat? Some unspecified threats from London.

Nope. No threats, specified or unspecified. The UK government said they wouldn't pass a referendum bill. The SNP complained loudly. But polls showed that there was only something like 30% support for another referendum, even though 45% voted for independence last time. And the polls still show that about the same percentage support independence.

Then there was a general election at which the SNP lost support and the unionist parties won some seats back. Now referendum talk has gone quiet. Unsurpisingly really.

It is not unreasonable for the UK government to say that Scotland has voted to stay in the EU, and has to wait its turn for another go while the whole government is busy with Brexit. It would appear that many Scots agree.

The Spanish government refuses to even have talks about holding a referendum on independence for Catalonia. Something that's politically stupid, morally wrong and in breach of the UN charter.

There's already been a referendum in Northern Ireland on whether they wanted to remain in the Union or not. Back in the 70s. There was also a referendum on the Good Friday agreement.

There was a majority in the Catalan assembly to hold this referendum - so they got to hold it. Not circumstantially in majority either, it was one of the main issues in the last regional election.

The Northern Irish assembly doesn't work the same. If there isn't a coalition formed with parties from both communities in it, there is no Northern Irish government. So without parties from both nationalist and unionist communities involved - this couldn't happen.

However I don't think any UK government would stop a referendum in Northern Ireland. We've just had one in Scotland, there's broad agreement that the Scots will get another go after Brexit if they want it, and few people would object if Northern Ireland wanted to vote.

Admittedly things get stickier if the leaving devolved assembly break the law. But the difference in the UK is that there shouldn't be a need to, as central government is flexible enough to allow the votes. If the Spanish government ignore a greater than 50% win for separatist parties calling for a vote - then they've no right to complain if they get ignored in return.

Self-determination is a human right, enshrined in the UN charter. Part of being a real democracy is accepting that, even if you don't like the result. If the Catalans feel they should be a separate country, then that is their right.

Re: re. Franco would be proud.

Scotland had its referendum. With few problems. It's pretty much agreed that they'll get another one, after the Brexit fun-and-games are all over.

Perhaps, in this case, the Spanish government might learn something from the British...

It's surely much easier to stop the referendum from happening than to deal with it if the result goes against. Obviously if there's only a turnout of 2% it'll be fine - but it looks bad enough stopping it from happening - let alone suppressing a result you've lost.

As I understand it, the Catalan assembly doesn't have the power to call this referendum - and it may even take a change to the constitution for the central government to allow one. But much better to face it early than wait - as support for independence looks to be growing. Pro-independence parties got a majority in the regional elections (for the first time ever I think), as I understand it on the promise of this referendum rather than because a majority want independence.

Re: Internet of Silos

I got a Google Chromecast - to watch a bit of iPlayer and NFL online. Which is fine, other than crap UI sometimes, which I can cope with.

Then I got the Amazon Prime trial. And not only was there not a Chromecast button on their app - but they'd also blocked the Chrome browser plug-in - so I couldn't cast it the hard way either.

With Kindle, they were hardware agnostic. I lost a lot of trust in their brand that day. Now, how do I know they'll keep that up with music and books, given they keep pushing into hardware devices?

You'd think disabled people who cant get out much would have investigated the net years ago.

It's almost as if they were suffering from an impairment to their ability to do stuff - and that this was holding them back somehow...

For example, braille is harder to use than text. It's slower to produce, slower to read, physically harder to do and takes up loads of space. My Mum is qualified as a VI teacher in her 40s - and has taught braille ever since. But she was never able to read it by feel - not a problem as she just looks. But many people who go blind later in life, also can't - and end up having to learn moon. Which uses bigger shapes - and thus takes up even more space. A blind kid I know did Lord of The Rings in English at school. It's a 13 volume book, each volume being 2' square and an inch thick.

Speech and listening area also slower than typing and reading text. And create problems if you try to do them in noisy environments.

Though you can now get a brilliant screenless laptop called a Braillenote (other brands may be available) which has either a 20 or 40 character braille display done with moving pins. But they are quite hard to use.

A few years ago, a company created a satnav. Entirely voice interface. But the layers of menus required to get most sat navs to work how you want, meant that only the brightest blind people with the best memories could operate it. Nested menus are so much easier to navigate when you can see them / and don't have to hold the menu structure in your head. So what you can now get is a sat nav where it tells you where you are. Thus if you get on the right bus / train, you know where to get off. It is either programmed for a specific destination from your home PC, or you can press the save this location button - so you can navigate your way back somewhere.

If you're deaf/blind then of course voice interfaces are bugger-all good to you.

If you suffer from certain physical disabilities, then you're only going to get on the net voice-activated if you've got someone else to physically set up the system for you.

Plus, as a general rule, some people are better at problem-solving than others. And that difference applies to disabled people as much as anyone else. They just have more problems they need to solve, and often less money/help to be able to solve them with.

Re: Pft, amateurs

I know someone who changed one of their accounts to:

Username: password

Password: admin

Which is actually surprisingly hard to enter, as your hands just automatically try to type them in the other way round, whatever your brain tells them to do.

That's often how Bletchley Park did it.

One of the breakthroughs (on the Lorenz code I think) was because some radio operator had mistyped one word in a signal. So with identical machine settings he re-sent the entire message with just that one letter corrected.

This gave them a message that started identically and then diverged - giving lots of lovely clues on how it worked.

Why should France get half the profits? Google are a US company who pour billions into research and even more billions into infrastructure. So surely most of their profits should accrue to where that value is added - a lot of which would be California?

There's no way to perfectly apportion this. But what we need is agreed international accounting rules on transfer-pricing. It's being done at the global talking-shops - but I can't see it taking less than 10-15 years.

Admittedly the stupid US Corp Tax system says that foreign profits are only subject to tax when repatriated. And you're allowed to defer that indefinitely. If they change that, so all tax is due, then they'd have to start paying their US corp tax. And if that hurt too much, then they'd move their innovation out of the US. So Trump may actually be right (for once) by talking about lowering their Corp Tax and ending that exemption. If he's competent enough to get that through Congress (ha ha).

At least then US multi-nationals might start paying more of their taxes. But I suspect a lot of it would go back to the US. But that's probably also where they should be paying most of them.

Import taxes are not normally used to correct for differences in tax regimes. They're normally used to protect cherished local industries against competition. Sometimes that competition may be getting an "unfair" advantage. Though how you define unfair is rather tough. China's labour is cheaper than ours because they're massively poorer than us as a country for example. They've also got lower employment and environmental standards for much the same reason.

Already as they've got richer in the last decade, they're now upping those environmental standards - because a bit of extra money is now less valuable than not choking to death on the streets of many cities. A situation that the UK went through an identical version of in the 19th and early 20th Centuries.

As a general rule of thumb, international trade makes the world as a whole richer. As it generally makes the global economy more efficient. And this latest explosion of globalisation has only stagnated living standards in a chunk of the West for about 15 years - meanwhile bringing a couple of billion poeple out of extreme poverty, and maybe growing the global middle class by some hundreds of millions.

The whole world is massively richer than its ever been, millions of lives have been saved, birth rates are falling as infant mortality has plummeted and almost everyone is doing better than they've ever done before. At a relatively low cost to the already developed countries.

Globalisation and free trade has been a success.

But, or course it ain't perfect. There are downsides - which need to be dealt with.

Lots of economic corrections take time. And while they slowly happen, people's lives get dislocated by economic changes and it's not much use saying that the economy will correct and return to equilibrium in twenty years time. As Keynes said, "in the long-run we're all dead."

For that, you need government, to come in and soften the blow. And try to speed up recovery in areas adversely affected by globalisation. And tidy up the edges, and stop people from taking the piss.

But it's really important to remember the good bits about international trade, as well as the bad bits. Criticise idiot free-marketeers all you like, but only if you're willing to look at the people attacking globalisation and say, "what are the costs of reversing it?"

Re: pay tax where their real economic activity is taking place

Well Google have many server farms. So that's some of their economic activity. But most of it would probably be where they design the services - plus where they sell advertising.

You can't have the advertising without the search. You know that thing everyone hates Starbucks for, where they offset their UK profit against their brand - held someowhere sunny? Well Google should do that, but the sunny place would be Silicon Valley. That's where most of their value is generated - so they should probably pay the majority of their corp taxes in California. We need new international accounting conventions to work this out.

Apple, similarly, are a California design company. They don't really manufacture much, they buy stuff in, it's just made to their spec. So a large chunk of their profits should probably accrue to California.

Vertically intergrated companies make it harder to work out. If Apple were a retail company, who bought their iPhones from manufacturers in China and sold them at Apple shops, then the manufacturer would pay its corp tax in China and Apple would pay where their stores were. But they're effectively manufacturer, wholesaler and retailer. So there's an argument to say all the profit goes to Cupertino. Or you could make them account for each divsion separately for tax purposes, and have UK Retail pay HQ a notional price for stuff, and pay UK corp tax on its notional profits.

There is no perfect answer to this. Accounting at this level is as much art as science. And that's not a veiled dig. I've been peripherally involved with international corporate accounting, and it's not the same as doing your personal taxes or even accounts for a simple £1m turnover company. There are no right answers. Even if you're 100% honest, and trying to pay your fair share of taxes across jurisdictions, there's no perfect way to do it.

Re: Sales Tax

Companies are unaffected by VAT. Apart from the expense of the admit overhead.

Consumers pay VAT.

What Google and Facebook sell is advertising. So yes, they charge VAT to their customers, which they pay to the government. But their customers are businesses, and so reclaim that VAT from the government, when they do their VAT return.

The advertisers then charge VAT to the companies they work for, who also reclaim it. The music stops with the final customer who isn't VAT rated, and so can't claim the money back. Which is either the consumer or some tiny business earning less than £50k a year.

So VAT is a tax on things that we buy as consumers.

As I understand it, the US sales tax is only charge by retailers selling to consumers. So business to business transactions aren't subject to it. So it operates a lot more simply than a VAT system, but has roughly the same effect.

Corporation Tax is a levy on profits that companies make.

Turnover taxes and transaction taxes are another thing entirely. They have the highest distorting effect on the economy. The usual rule of thumb is that if you tax something, you get less of it. So if you tax economic transactions, you'll get less of them. Which almost by definition will shrink the size of your economy.

The EU stopped its financial transaction tax, because the Commission's research determined that it would shrink the economy so much that other tax revenues would fall more than the revenue raised by the tax. So it would earn negative money for governments and permanently shrink the economy. A tax on non-financial transactions would almost certainly be worse.

Re: Ouch!

I talked about some harmonisation of corp tax and VAT in my original post. That, I think, is possible. Though Ireland / Luxemburg / Malta etc would want some compensation for giving up some more of their sovereignty.

That kind of treaty change would require a referendum in Ireland, Denmark, and probably also France and Sweden plus a couple of others. It's one of the reasons Cameron couldn't get much in his renegotiation, Juncker is almost the only major European politician who'd like to see treaty change. None of the national governments dare touch it, as they're all too scared of trying to sell a referendum on more integration. Even if the Eurozone could come up with some policy to make the Euro a workable long-term currency, they then also have to work out how to get the voters to approve it - or come up with a policy that doesn't need treaty change.

Anyway some harmonisation of rules could just be done by inter-governmental agreement. And as long as it doesn't totally fix rates, it's not that bad for democracy. Obviously you can't raise as much through corp tax and VAT (or even get more than you want), but you still get to decide on green taxes, income taxes, stamp duties, dividend rates and land taxes.

Against the loss of sovereignty argument is also the reality one. All EU governments are currently free to set their corp tax rates to 50%. They just can't. Because all their companies would leave. Even small businesses might profit from setting up a branch in some other Single Market country, and moving their profits there at that point. So maybe agreeing a band of acceptable taxes might help, or even just agreeing ways to collect them, and the kind of offers you're allowed to make to attract companies from other countries.

There's already a tiny bit of VAT harmonisation. Once we charge VAT on something, no future government can remove it again. Which is why when Major's government brought fuel charges into VAT, Labour were only allowed to reduce them to 5% (as we had a pre-exisiting 5% rate for some things). Same with the campaign to get tampons zero-rated - EU rules don't allow. 5% is the minimum - obviously until we leave the EU.

Turnover taxes are a rubbish idea. They favour high profit / low volume companies over low margin / high volume ones. So they'd punish Huawei as against Apple, for example. They also deter investment and so growth.

The answer may well have to be some Single Market corporation tax and VAT harmonisation. Although it would help if Ireland kept their low Corp Tax rate, but made companies pay it on all single market revenue, and stopped allowing non-Irish profits to escape.

Also Trump may help here. If he can get Congress to lower US Corp tax to nearer European levels, there'll be less incentive to dodge it. But the worst distortion is caused by the tax deferral on retained foreign earnings. If US companies had to pay tax on it anyway, they wouldn't have kept a couple of trillion dollars off-shore, avoiding the tax for now, and hoping for a tax holiday to persuade them to repatriate the loot.

This won't make Europe happy, as most of Apple and Google's taxes will go to Uncle Sam. But that is where most of their economic activity is really, so it's reasonable.

In the long term the answer is global cooperation, and harmonised rules on accounting for international profits. If the big tax authorities audited, and shared their data a bit, they could keep the global corps relatively honest.

Re: Threats and opportunites

We can just ban them from putting roaming charges back as part of their license terms if we want to. It only means that they put their prices up to all consumers so that they can't charge extra for roaming - which is what they did when the European rules came in anyway.