Money Category
Money in the news and how you are going to pay and pay and pay
We’re all getting diesel generators to beat climate change – WTF!
THIS has to be the most insane side effect of the hysteria over climate change yet: we’re all supposed to kit ourselves out with diesel generators:
NHS hospitals are being asked to cut their power demand from the National Grid as part of a government attempt to stave off power blackouts, which the energy watchdog Ofgem warns could arrive as early as 2015.
According to one energy company, four hospitals have already signed up to a deal under which they will reduce demand at peak times by using diesel-fired generators.
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Do we have to start saving our own pee to produce phosphorus for farming?
SOME scientists are working on the idea that we do you know. Fortunately, they’ve really not grasped an important part about the world that we live in:
American families may soon be using waterless toilets and recycling their urine, according to new research.
Chemical engineers at the University of Florida have been looking at ways to extract phosphorus – a life-sustaining element – from urine, before it enters the sewage system and becomes diluted.
Since estimates suggest that phosphorous – which occurs as phosphate rocks and is mined for crop fertilizer – could be exhausted in the next 50 to 100 years, urine recycling may be the key to conserving the non-renewable resource in the future.
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Posted: 1st, July 2013 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
Apple pays no UK tax yet again – this is why
SO, someone’s gone and had a look at the Apple UK tax filings and once again we find that the company has paid no UK corporation tax whatever. Which really shouldn’t some as all that much of a surprise:
The US technology giant used tax deductions from share awards to employees to help wipe out the corporation tax liabilities of its UK businesses.
Accounts filed by one of Apple’s two main UK divisions, Apple Retail UK Ltd, showed the company made a pre-tax profit of £16m on sales of almost £1bn in the year to September 29.
Another subsidiary, Apple (UK) Ltd, made a pre-tax profit of £43.8m on sales of £93m, according to accounts filed at Companies House, while a third, Apple Europe, made a pre-tax profit of £8m.
However, the company offset tax deductions relating to share schemes of £27.7m against its corporation tax liabilities in the UK. The move also enabled it to claim a tax credit of £3.8m to carry forward to future years. Experts have also suggested Apple’s total sales in the UK are far higher, as many are logged elsewhere.
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About those tax-dodging hypocrites at The Guardian
THE Guardian’s been lambasting any and every one who doesn’t pay the amount of tax that they think they should. But of course, we find there is hypocrisy there:
The events and magazines company Top Right Group ran up a corporation tax bill of just £200,000 despite making a pre-tax profit of £186.2m last year.
Top Right, owned by Guardian Media Group and Apax Partners, landed a huge one-off windfall of £166.1m after selling its motoring research arm, CAP. Its chief financial officer, Mandy Gradden, told The Independent the profits on the sale were “exempt from tax under the substantial shareholding exemption which is available to every company in the UK”.
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Posted: 28th, June 2013 | In: Money | Comments (2)
Branding A Rotten Apple: Stormfront Opens Outlets (Chapters) All Over The UK
BRANDING. There is much in a name. Which makes us wonder why the chain of Apple resellers is called STORMFRONT? The Exeter-based retailer has 24 stores across the UK.
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There’s a reason companies are people: The ACLU v NSA proves it
THERE much spluttering around about the fact that companies are people. However, there’s a damned good reason that they are: if they weren’t we couldn’t sue them. And we like being able to sue companies when they stuff up or rip us off.
This particular example is more about the US than UK but the principle still stands:
If progressives had their way, the ACLU’s latest challenge to the NSA’s domestic surveillance would easily be dismissed. ACLU v Clapper, filed in the wake of the Snowden revelations, is based on the ACLU’s First and Fourth Amendment rights, which, according to progressives, ACLU should not possess. It is, after all, a corporation, and constitutional amendments aggressively promoted by progressives would limit constitutional rights to “natural persons.”
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Posted: 27th, June 2013 | In: Money | Comments (2)
It’s the schools to blame for the property crash, not the banks
THIS looks like an interesting piece of propaganda from our neo-capitalist overlords in the banking system. The property crash wasn’t actually their fault at all, oh no sirree. Actually, it was the state school system:
People with poor maths skills are more likely to be behind with their mortgage payments and have their home repossessed, according to a study.
It shows the risk of defaulting on a mortgage is directly linked to a home owner’s maths skills and could explain the mortgage defaults in the recent global crisis.
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Guardian Australia fails to understand the Aussie dollar and how Sony sells its PS4
AS you may or may not know The Guardian has just started up an online section devoted to Australia. And it’s terribly comforting to know that even on the other side of the world the lefties are subject to the same damn delusions as they are here. For example, we’ve got a complaint about how the Sony PS 4 is going to be more expensive in Oz that it is in other countries:
All that, and it cost $100 USD less, too, coming in at $399. It seemed like Sony could do no wrong. But for all this fanfare and literal standing ovation, there’s a problem for Australian gamers. The PS4 is set to retail at a tooth-grindingly expensive $549 because of… reasons? That’s too much. I’ve checked. You can too. Sony haven’t explained their unique pricing structure yet, but it seems like a fairly arbitrary dollop of Australian tax.
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Posted: 25th, June 2013 | In: Money | Comment (1)
Wonga puts its lending rate up to 5,853 per cent
NOT that it actually means very much but it’ll give some campaigners something else to shout about:
Payday loan giant Wonga has increased the interest rate it uses to illustrate the cost of borrowing to 5,853 per cent – a rise of 1,600 per cent.
All hail UKUncut as Starbucks pays some tax it doesn’t owe
I GUESS we should call this a victory for UKUncut. Starbucks has just paid some tax:
The coffee shop chain will reveal the amounts in its annual report, which is set to be published as early as this week, saying that it has started the process of paying the £20m over two years it promised in 2012.
The figures will reveal that the business is still making an annual loss of £30.4m – a 7.5pc reduction in losses from the year before when they stood at £32.9m.
But I will admit that I’ve got something of a problem with this victory.
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Posted: 24th, June 2013 | In: Money | Comments (2)
Floyd Mayweather Jr. posing with his money – photos
FLOYD Mayweather Jr. enjoys spending quality time with his money. Having earned a fortune from boxing, Mayweather enjoys tasteless displays of wealth. There’s the $100,000 jacket, the big gambling chips and the bottles of Cristal champagne – but just four of them. Mayweather should try harder. He’s soooo high street. As the sticking rich man said to the merely rich man, “I see you have a new Rolls Royce. Pity you’re so poor that you feel a need for one.”
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Competition from Sony forces Microsoft U-Turns on the Xbox One ‘authorisation’ rip off
MICROSOFT has just done a complete u-turn on the terms and conditions under which their new Xbox One will operate. They had been proposing that used games would require “authorisation” to move from one box to another. Obviously, so that hands could be held out for a fee to facilitate this authorisation.
The machine had to dial in over the internet every day for any games at all to keep working. And finally there would be region blocking on games: no buying your stuff cheap off Amazon US and then playing it in more expensive Europe for example.
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Posted: 20th, June 2013 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
Cheltenham shopping centre opens up range of dull fake shops – photos
THE High Street is dying. It’s victim of restructuring. But until it can be redesigned to make better use of space and local retailers and suppliers who can’t afford exorbitant rates set before the internet kicked in, the high street will continues to feature empty units.
But why not pretend they’re real shops? At Coronation Square shopping centre in Hester’s Way, Cheltenham, the owners of a struggling shopping centre have been filling empty lots with fake shops. They are remarkably unimaginative. Why not have a WMD retailer, a purveyor of stains that look like Jesus Christ or a shop selling cats that look like Hitler?
The internet is winning. The old high street needs to readjust:
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Posted: 19th, June 2013 | In: Money, The Consumer | Comment
Polly Toynbee on the terrors of the tax system – Denmark is cheaper than the UK
POLLY Toynbee has decided to have a good old rant about the iniquities of the UK tax system. It’s all terrible that we cannot actually manage to take all that cash off the rich. Where do they think they are, in a free society or something?
And then she says this:
But the IFS says Denmark successfully collects its high top rate because it has no dodges: the rich can be taxed if reliefs are blocked.
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Magician turns dollar bills into hundreds for the homeless
SNEER all you want, but now and then, it is great to put a little sunshine in that grey brain of yours. Mocking celebrities, laughing at misfortune and all that is great fun for those of us who enjoy gallows humour, but sometimes, we need to get gooey and break out a huge, wet grin.
The person who will be responsible for that today is a nice magician who used his powers to help out some destitute folks in need of a pick-me-up.
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Supreme Court rules that US companies cannot own the patents on human genes
SO. Can you patent human genes? The US Supreme Court – yep, it actually got that far before someone saw sanity – said you cannot:
The case involved Myriad Genetics Inc., which holds patents related to two genes, known as BRCA1 and BRCA2, that can indicate whether a woman has a heightened risk of developing breast cancer or ovarian cancer.
Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the court, said the genes Myriad isolated are products of nature, which aren’t eligible for patents.
The high court’s ruling was a win for a coalition of cancer patients, medical groups and geneticists who filed a lawsuit in 2009 challenging Myriad’s patents. Thanks to those patents, the Salt Lake City company has been the exclusive U.S. commercial provider of genetic tests for breast cancer and ovarian cancer.
The challengers argued the patents have allowed Myriad to dictate the type and terms of genetic screening available for the diseases, while also dissuading research by other laboratories.
America is going mad – stark, raving mad.
Spotter: @tylercowen
Posted: 13th, June 2013 | In: Money, Technology | Comment
Sainsbury’s Boss Spouts Bollocks: boss wants internet firm to pay supermarket-sized business rates
THIS really is a bit much coming from the boss of Sainsbury’s. It’s total and complete bollocks: my assumption is that it’s a direct attempt to mislead. He’s claiming that a US law which makes internet sellers pay sales tax (our equivalent is VAT) means that we should have a law that makes internet sellers pay business rates as if they had huge shops all over the place.
In the UK, Mr King is one of a number of high-profile retailers who have warned that businesses rates, a tax on commercial property, are crippling the high street because there is no equivalent for online retailers.
“The burden of taxation falls very heavily on bricks and mortar retailers,” Mr King said. “I think we need to rebalance the tax burden.”
Business rates are costing the retail industry more than £7bn a year and increased by an inflation-linked £175m in April. The British Retail Consortium, the trade body, has held talks with the Treasury about their concerns after a string of high street retailers collapsed into administration earlier in the year.
Mr King said the Marketplace Fairness Act was designed “specifically to address this issue”. Shop owners in the US have backed the tax, although it has proved controversial because of concerns about how the tax can be collected when online transactions occur across state and national boundaries.
No it wasn’t you numpty. It’s got absolutely sod all to do with property taxes (the US equivalent of business rates).
Until very recently an online retailer in the US did not add sales tax to its bills (only if it had an actual office in the state it was sending the stuff to did it add it). The MFA changes this, so internet retailers will now collect the sales tax of the place that the goods are sent to. This is just like the VAT system in Europe. You’re in the UK, you pay UK VAT on what you buy over the internet (except electronic books and software for some reason). You’re in Germany, you pay German VAT.
Business rates are an entirely different matter. You pay these based on the value of the property that you run the business from. And not unaturally, shops on the high street are worth more than a shed on some trading estate in the wilds of the Midlands. Thus the online retailers do indeed have an advantage: but it’s an entirely natural and just one. They pay less in property taxes because they use less property.
What King is saying here is that it’s unfair that I pay more petrol tax filling up a Chelsea tractor than if I fill up a Ford Fiesta. Well, yes, that’s the point of it, isn’t it? I’m using more so I should be paying more tax.
God knows where he got the idea that we’d be taken in by this from.
The Glorious Bolivarian Socialist Revolution: country runs out of toilet paper
THERE are economic cock ups and then there are economic cock ups. OK, so allowing half the banks to go bust in 2008 doesn’t make neoliberalism look all that good, sure. But allowing a nation to run out of toilet paper is the sort of thing that only happens in Bolivarian socialism:
Toilet roll has been in short supply in the South American country in recent months, with economists blaming price controls imposed by the government.
The new programme, launched last week, uses crowdsourcing technology to enable users to let each other know which supermarkets still have stocks of the tissue.
Called Abasteceme – “Supply Me” in English – the free Android app has already been downloaded more than 12,000 times.
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We’ve probably got enough government now they’re rationing chips
WE’VE definitely got enough government when they can nick £30 million off us to fund people to tell us to order fewer chips with our meals.
Restaurant customers ought to order smaller plates of chips, the Government’s recycling advisers have declared.
They say that too many people leave cold fried potatoes uneaten on their plates – and as a result hundreds of thousands of tons of food waste each year have to be dumped by pubs, restaurants and fast food chains.
They called for waiters to be trained to tell customers they ought to have less chips, and for ‘stealth menus’ designed to encourage diners to go for lighter meals.
The campaign against chips was launched by the Waste and Resources Action Programme, a £30million-a-year quango set up to encourage more recycling.
Fire them, burn the building to the ground and plough the land with salt so they can never come back.
Quite apart from the stupidity of grown adults trying to tell other grown adults such things they’re supposed to be encouraging us into recycling. And we’ve had for centuries a very efficient method of recycling food scraps. Feed ’em to the pigs. Except that’s now been banned, you can’t feed swill to them any more. Despite the fact that they love it and we’ve gothundreds of thousands of tonnes of stuff that could be used to make bacon.
‘Mmmm. Bacon.
So yes, we’ve definitely got too much government and really ought to be cutting back on it.
Posted: 12th, June 2013 | In: Money | Comments (3)
So is Thames Water tax dodging or not?
THERE are a few alarm bells ringing about this story. Here’s the Mail’s take:
Britain’s biggest water company paid no corporation tax last year despite imposing inflation-busting price rises on millions of customers.
Thames Water made profits of £549million last year after sales rose six per cent to £1.8billion.
But the Australian-backed group, which serves nine million customers in London and the Thames Valley, paid nothing in corporation tax – and even received a £5million tax credit.
The group also spent £400million in interest payments for its £8.4billion debts
The rich get richer but absolute poverty is being beaten
WE’RE regularly told that rising inequality is a great social evil: that it’s far better if places are more equal, that people are more equal, whatever the level of actual wealth that has been achieved.
At which point people like me start shouting “Piffle!”. For while it might indeed be true that at any level of general wealth less inequality might be a good idea (depends upon your personal views really, but it’s possible) it seems clear and obvious that everyone being equal at $1 a day is worse than having more inequality but most people are on much more than $1 a day.
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On the front line at the Bilderberg Group summit – Watford (photos)
THE Bilderberg Group summit has rolled into Watford. The annual meeting of royalty, politicians, billionaire investors, banking and corporate CEOs, policy-makers and media moguls from all over the world is in Elton John’s hometown. For three days, Watford isn’t all about hot hatchbacks, smoking in Cassiobury Park and Harry Potter World. It;s about money and power meeting in secret behind police protection.
If you’re looking for a conspiracy to believe in, the Bilderberg Group is a good place to start. US radio host Alex Jones (pictured below) says of the BG: “The Devil is trying to create an artificial, omnipresent system. If you don’t believe in the Devil, folks, you haven’t studied. Everything these people do is to try to become God.”
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London’s Green Belt is simply a subsidy to land owners
YES, yes, I know, it’s absolutely lovely that people can’t build over Surrey and Sussex and Hampshire: not that anyone would care of they did Essex. And that’s what the Green Belt around London is said to achieve: to stop those horrible ribbon developments of the 1930s. You know, those large spacious houses with a decent garden that everyone wants to live in and which cost over £1 million a pop these days?
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The massive Lionel Richie head Kickstarter is go
WHAT the world needs is a huge head modelled to look like Lionel Richie’s noggin. If this Kickstarter project can make it, the world will have what it needs.
For your money you get “internal turbines to keep his head up, internal sandbags to keep his head down” and “Head Guards” to protect the head from human lice. You also get a “Lionel Richie Head Paper Mask” (£9), and “a chance for and your partner to stay overnight in Lionel Richie’s Head” (£1,000).
A good looking Lionel Richie Head at a respectable height (3m) will cost us £4,900… We hope with the possible success of raising the money to make a 3m inflatable sculpture, that we also reach our additionally intended ‘Stretch Goal’ of £10k. This money will be used to make Lionel Richie’s Head bigger (6m). Making it bigger allows us to create a portal that will let Bestivalers go inside Lionel Richie’s Head.
Posted: 5th, June 2013 | In: Celebrities, Money | Comment
So this has been Amazon’s plan all along, eh? France gets it wrong, as ever
WHAT is Amazon’s big plan? We know now:
France’s culture minister has attacked Amazon, the online retailer, for deliberately undercutting traditional rivals to create a “quasi-monopoly”, in the latest assault by the socialist government on internet companies.
“Today, everyone has had enough of Amazon which, through dumping practices, smashes prices to penetrate markets to then raise prices again once they are in a situation of quasi-monopoly,” said Aurélie Filippetti, the culture minister.
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