My experience of Quip is very similiar to how you described Dropbox Paper (which I haven't used): write, get feedback with in-line comments, collaborate, and forget the whole thing. But it's nice, slim, and fast.

And, thankfully, EU has regulations against such schemes. We can have international treaties and organisations to prevent cases of tradegy of commons.

For example, EU forces Ireland to collect taxes from Apple, because it deemed such rebates to be illegal state aid. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_illegal_State_aid_case_agai...

They did not force them to raise their tax rate though, so it is still highly beneficial to Apple to be in Ireland compared to, say, France.

What member countries really should do is similar to the revenue tax that was recently proposed. But not exactly, because that's a pretty blunt tool. Instead, the calculation should go something like this.

    # Exclude payments to/from subsidiaries.
    global_revenue = all external revenue
    global_expenses = all external non-tax costs
    global_profit = global_revenue - global_expenses
    global_tax = this_country_tax_rate * global_profit
    country_tax = this_country_revenue / global_revenue 
                  * global_tax

The goal being to remove the benefit of tax avoiding schemes like Ireland. It doesn't matter how you move the money around, you'll pay taxes to this country based on how much money you make here.

Require the company to estimate and pay this tax quarterly, and provide reasonable fines for underpayment. Granted the first two lines might be difficult to compute, so you would only do this for companies big enough to be worth going through the trouble for.

Disclaimer: not a tax policy expert. Would love to be corrected. Please poke holes.

While their rates are low, the issue was about additional, individual deals that lead to effective tax rates around .5% (instead of the official 12.5%, I believe).

I think the EU has done a pretty good job to find a balance here: when Ireland joined the EU in the 70s, it was among the poorest countries west of Moscow and north of Morocco. It became one of the largest recipients of net transfers over the next 30 years, but everyone knew that their chances of catching up required some economic competitiveness, and that it would take decades to pull even in terms of "Features" (infrastructure, local market etc)

Low taxes were therefore the only viable path to attract investments. That scenario is explicitly accepted even among those advocating for coordinated taxation.

In the case of Ireland, everything actually worked out extremely well: Speaking something almost resembling the english language, and having the strength of character to make peace with the English, Ireland established world-class universities and a rather remarkable knowledge economy in just one generation.

Sure. But are these subsidies still needed? In any case, my proposal was more along the lines of an approach to unilaterally prevent companies from benefiting from off-shoring tax schemes, under the assumption you want to do that. The thing I want holes poked in is the scheme itself, since I'm taking as given that some people want to institute a scheme with this goal.

> Speaking something almost resembling the english language,

Dude... not cool.

Why should the EU care? It seems like these rules exist in order to effectively subsidize more expensive governments. If France did what Ireland did, France would collapse under its own weight, so the EU uses these rules to protect less competitive member countries. So the EU pushes things like minimum tax rates rather than alternatively pushing maximum tax rates. If an EU country proposed a 50% corporate tax, the EU would be ok with that, but if a member proposed a 2% taxe, the EU would lose their mind.

I don't think this post was limited on side projects. Many people reading this are working, or will work in environments where safety and correctness are important, if not critical.

He says that he got rid of the documents, there's no way to verify it. I think there are no reasons to take his statements at the face value, given the players involved in the overall situation -- the world's top intelligence agencies.

Exactly. But look at what responses I get when I just point out the possibility Snowden may be lying.

I do recognize the value of the revelations. I just don't accept Snowden's motives at face value.

I'm not saying there is evidence for colusion with Russia prior to the affair, but it's very possible and explains quite a few things.

>Exactly. But look at what responses I get when I just point out the possibility Snowden may be lying.

Given the number of times the intelligence agencies have verifiably lied about this affair alone (many) and the number of times Snowden has verifiably lied (zero), why would you default to believing the known liars?

>and explains quite a few things

There's very little that is unexplained about Snowden.

Why would China or Russia deport him or detain him any longer than necessary to strip him and squeeze him a bit? It's not like he's getting any new info, and this way he remains a source of political destabilization for the US.

>So somebody who hasn't been caught lying yet can't possibly lie?

Is, as you are well aware, not what I said.

>I'm not really believing much of what the NSA or CIA said about him.

...except the accusation that he's a Russian spy which you are very attached to.

>I also don't believe the intended travel itinerary. Wouldn't it be easier to make a vacation in Venezuela

If he booked a flight to Venezuela and didn't tell anybody he would have been detained at the airport. If he told somebody he would have been investigated and then game over. This was explained at the time. There were certain places people like him could fly to which wouldn't set off any trip wires. Hong Kong was the only one he could fly to where he wasn't just going to be detained and sent home (I mean, he could ahve gone to the UK too but probably not so wise).

The NSA did not dispute this part of the story.

>How did he know China wouldn't detain/deport him?

He didn't. They probably just seemed like the least likely to detain him of all the places he could fly to unmonitored.

I'm not saying you beat your wife, but it's very possible and explains quite a few things.

Now seriously, I honestly don't know: what would Snowden being in colusion with Russa prior to the affair explain, or explain better?

His itinerary, for example. Or the successful application of covert techniques (as opposed to Manning and Assange).

Less of a factor is that in my opinion, the whole endeavor would be more believably be the result of someone being convinced and assured of assistance, maybe even rewarded, than the courage of a singular man.

Please keep in mind, I value the alternatives where Snowden wasn't recruited beforehand as equally plausible. Not that much more plausible, though.

See http://blog.ycombinator.com/moving-forward-on-basic-income: this one-year study is just a pilot, it works as a preparation for a longer-term one.

What if they don't tell the people when the income is going to stop coming in?

Doesn't seems all that ethical thing to do even though it would give a better picture of how it would work.

They've said they're working with an external IRB. Not telling them would be a massive issue for informed consent, and at least if I was sitting on said IRB would generate a pretty firm "Um...no."

A big part of this experiment is that we want to see how (and if) basic income will change people's behavior. To be able to do this, the income stream has to be reliable. That's why the idea is often called Basic Income Guarantee or Unconditional Basic Income.

If the income stream could just stop at any time, you couldn't measure its psychological impact as effectively.

Why not give the subjects a basic income for life? That will mirror the potential reality of basic income. You could still only run the study for a year (or five years) but you'd have to pay out for the rest of their lives if you want the subjects to behave in a realistic way.

Oracle's, not Cisco's.

The decision rules that it would be Google's responsibility to filter search results, instead of the responsibility of actual page removing private data. So you can find the data if you know where to look at, just don't use Google?

From the decision:

"... the activity of a search engine consisting in finding information published or placed on the internet by third parties, indexing it automatically, storing it temporarily and, finally, making it available to internet users according to a particular order of preference must be classified as 'processing of personal data' within the meaning of Article 2(b) when that information contains personal data and, second, the operator of the search engine must be regarded as the 'controller' in respect of that processing, within the meaning of Article 2(d)."

Hopefully replying to requests will be sufficient. Otherwise, even simply the obligation to detect that there is something the law requires to be removed will be a new burden on search engines and any similar services.

I think the problem is that if it isn't on Google it's highly unlikely people will find it unless they were looking for it. If your fear is people accidentally discovering it while doing a search on you (e.g. an potential employer) removing it from Google is key.

it's both. if the original site changes the data, you still need/want to remove it from caches, be it google, wayback machine, other search engines, etc. it's going to be a mess.