Google are usually ones to get things right, like Google Maps and Streetview. Nobody 'wanted' this before it existed, but by now, everybody is used to it and it is bloody handy.
Originally, there were two modes for creating new posts. In 'HTML' mode you entered plain text and inserted your own html tags for formatting; in the other, you could highlight and format text in much the same way as you use Word. I preferred HTML mode because Compose generated a load of superfluous 'div' tags which buggered up the line spacing; you had to use HTML mode to get rid of them all again. But each to their own.
This time, in the face of zero demand from anybody, they've made HTML mode uneccessarily complicated. For no reason whatsoever, it now shows line numbers on the left, and you have to type in a line break tag at the end of each line and for every blank line.
Which is a pain in the arse:
Nothing else is as accessible as it used to be either. Detailed stats are now four or five clicks away which used to be two or three, and filtering your post list by labels is much more faff.
And it puts "div" tags before and after images, so you have to go back in and delete them if you don't want to end up with weird closer line spacing on all text below the image.
I was very busy at work this week; Mrs W was abroad on holiday all week so I was on single-parent duty (which is not that difficult once your kids are school-age) and the weather was nice so sitting in the garden was always the obvious thing to do.
YOUNG families are being milked by councils who are now charging to take away nappies as part of their household rubbish.
The charges – for either big bins or special plastic bags – have been slammed as being unfair on families and could cause fly-tipping.
It is complete nonsense.
- The cost of emptying household bins (and those of most businesses) is surprisingly small, average £100 to £200 per year per household/business.
- If they are going to charge extra for nappies, why not charge extra for everything that people throw away?
- If they are going to levy specific amounts for what people put in the bin, the most efficient way of doing it would be to levy the charge when they buy it new. I covered all that years ago. That largely solves the fly tipping and enforcement issues.
If you want to simplify it and put a number on it, a flat tax of 1% of the value of all the products which households and businesses buy would cover the cost of refuse collection. Seeing as VAT is already 20% on most things, people buying e.g. disposable nappies have already paid for the cost twenty times over.
2. My view is that each election is actually a referendum in which everybody can choose their own question.
So while the Greens and UKIP have had little electoral success (apart from in meaningless EU Parliament elections), they did manage to shift the terms of debate in their favour and the two big parties adjusted their policies accordingly.
That being so, the Tories messed up the election because Labour nearly outflanked them with their two main vote grabbing proposals - "an end to austerity" and "reducing tuition fees". Lots of people voted for the former and they got an extra few million younger people who'd like to see the end of tuition fees.
One of the key architects of David Cameron’s austerity programme has suggested the government must consider tax rises and increased spending on public services to respond to overwhelming pressure on social care, schools and the NHS.
The Conservatives must "change hard" to win over young voters who backed Labour in June's general election, Theresa May's most senior minister has warned.
Damian Green told Tories to modernise after losing their majority in the general election and trailing behind Labour by 30% among voters aged 18-35... Speaking at the Bright Blue liberal conservative think-tank's conference in central London, Mr Green said a new "city Conservativism" would woo young, metropolitan voters... Mr Green also suggested there was a "national debate that we need to have" about university tuition fees.
This is all tokenism of course, there is no sincerity on either side, but it confirms my suspicion that there is no need for - or any real prospect of - any YPP candidate with Georgist policies to be - or being - elected. As soon as we are getting a few per cent of the vote, the big two parties will modify their policies accordingly to try and put us out of business.
(The most successful UK movement of recent years doesn't even bother having their own party - it's the old age pensioners. They push out simplistic and inherently contradictory slogans i.e. "We have worked hard and paid taxes and saved hard all our lives". The "worked hard and paid taxes" justifies higher old age pensions, plus all the extra NHS spending. The "paid taxes and saved hard" bit is the argument against taxing land values i.e. clawing back inflated house prices. Hang about here - if they really have saved so hard, how come they need hand outs and subsidies? A century of deficit spending suggests they weren't paying enough taxes, doesn't it? But they get what they want because they bother to go out and vote, that's it, one tick every few years, job done, don't bother with silly protest marches, get on with more important things - a winning strategy.)
3. EU v Google.
Disclaimer - I am big fan of Google: their search engine, gmail, Blogger, Google maps, Google translate, Chrome are all free to use, work very well and make the world a better place. I am no fan of the EU for various reasons. But every now and then the EU get it right.
As I said last year, we all now that these supra-national corporations take the piss on corporation tax, which is not actually that important, because they get stung for VAT, PAYE and Business Rates which are more difficult to evade. National governments know this but find it difficult to draw up and enforce rules which would make them pay "the right amount" of corporation tax in any country.
So the EU doesn't bother with all that, it just invents some trumped up anti-competitive practices and fines them a few billion every few years.
The European Union has fined Google €2.42bn (£2.14bn) after a seven-year investigation into claims the technology giant abused its internet search monopoly.
The penalty is the biggest ever competition fine from the European Commission, doubling the previous record handed to Intel in 2009. The EU said Google had broken EU competition law by exploiting the power of its search engine to promote its online shopping service, at the expense of other price comparison sites.
Which doesn't make sense on their terms - it's Google's search engine and they can use it to advertise what they like, surely? You wouldn't expect the Tesco website to carry advertising for competitors.
The real point, which the EU seem to have missed is not just that Google have a competitive advantage that amounts to a monopoly, it is that what they are charging their advertisers is rent. As with land rent, the value arises from agglomeration benefits (same as Air BNB or Uber), consumers use it because so many sellers use it and vice versa. It is surely more efficient for everybody to use the same marketplace for buying and selling, that's fine, what is not so fine is for a third party, to siphon off part of the producer and consumer surplus.
4. On the topic of Google, Microsoft etc, Benjamin' emailed me a link to a splendid lecture by a succesful Silicon Valley insider/investor called "Competition is for losers".
It's fifty minutes long but I watched it all the way through. I gritted my teeth at the appalling typo at 25 minutes 14 seconds; applauded at 31 minutes when he points out that the main beneficiares of the British Industrial Revolution were landowners ("The workers didn't make that much, the capitalists didn't make that much either"). The most telling bit is where he cheerfully admits that competition and free markets are good for society as a whole, but promptly dismisses it as a way for an individual businessman to make money (I didn't make a note of when he says it).
5. Right, I'm off back into the garden, shame to waste the sunshine.
Former Conservative Chancellor Lord Lawson told the Telegraph: "It is profoundly unsatisfactory that corporation tax has to be collected from large multinational corporations by a series of ad hoc compromise deals, as we have once again seen with the Google affair.
"It is also grossly unfair on smaller businesses, who are unable to shift profits between tax jurisdictions and have to pay the full amount due under UK law."
Google's tax agreement came after years of criticism of it and other multinational firms over their tax arrangements in the UK and across Europe. The payment by Google, praised by Chancellor George Osborne as a "victory" for the government, covered money owed since 2005 and followed a six-year inquiry by HMRC.
Lord Lawson said the arrangement showed corporation tax should be replaced with "a much lesser tax, bolstered by a tax on corporate sales".
Duh.
Google are already actually minimising two separate taxes - VAT (a tax on sales) and corporation tax (a tax on net profits) - by booking the sales and the profits in low- or no-tax countries.
If the UK replaced corporation tax with a tax on corporate sales, they would discover that most of Google's sale to UK customers are from Ireland and have been for years, and that Google would pay even less tax than now.
So either Lawson is far stupider than I gave him credit for; he is working for Google et al; or he is just one of these Homeys/Faux Libs who would like to reduce corporation tax and increase VAT (the worst tax of all) accordingly because that benefits banks and landowners at the expense of the productive economy.
The board of directors of Google has voted in favour of breaking up the European Union, as a solution to complaints that it favours its own services.
Executives have no power to enforce a break-up, but the landmark vote sends a clear message to European regulators.
European Parliament politicians have voiced their dismay at the vote. The ultimate decision will rest with lobbyists for other large international corporations such as Apple and Fiat.
They are currently being investigated for anti-competitive practices and sweetheart tax deals entered into with Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Ireland.
RENTS are rising, pushing people on low incomes out of the neighbourhoods they’ve lived in for years. Resentment towards the rich is growing, with the most profitable and dynamic industries singled out for the most ire. Talk of a cost of living crisis, driven above all by the cost of housing, is dominating politics.
This isn’t London, it’s San Francisco. In Resentment City, as Time called it this week, discontent has focused on the Silicon Valley workers whose housing needs and high incomes have driven the price of rents out of the reach of many long-time residents...
Yes, that's as can't be helped. We want to have successful businesses who pay high wages, and their employees like living near their employer so rents go up.
But the transfer of wealth here is not from the natives to the newly arrived high earners (if anything it is in the other direction, trickle down), it is from both groups to land owners, who collect the higher rents from both groups (trickle up).
But they’ve chosen the wrong target. The problem is not too many rich Silicon Valleyites buying and renting, it’s that the city has a housing shortage. It comes down to supply and demand. As the Cato Institute’s David Boaz has noted, San Francisco’s strict planning laws have made it much more costly to build new housing to meet rising demand. Zoning laws restrict the construction of higher density buildings on the city’s limited land mass...
Yes, they've chosen the wrong target. But the target is neither "the government" nor "strict planning laws".
The real passive beneficiary of all this are the landowners. Governments don't go round imposing strict planning laws for the sadistic fun of it, they do it under pressure from different groups of landowners, all wishing to collect/enjoy as much rent as possible while preventing others from doing so.
The fact that they are cutting off their noses to spite their own faces and making things worse for everybody is by-the-by.
Instead of Google employees, we have bankers and foreigners, but the principle is the same: people are attacking the demand-side, instead of asking why the government has put a stranglehold on the supply-side...
The government didn't, the landowners did, using the government as its own agent.
The US economist Karl Smith has pointed out that a new book by Thomas Piketty on the history of equality seems to show that the rise in capital’s share of GDP in the West is largely down to land-use planning controls like those of London and San Francisco. If we want to let the market do its job of resolving conflicts over scarce resources, we – and San Franciscans – should be angry at the government, not the rich.
For a start, the share of GDP going to capital has been going down in line with the share going to wages (reflected by lower interest rates), it is the share going to monopolies, above all to land owners, which has been increasing.
We also happen to know as a matter of fact that new construction only puts a very short term dampener on price rises, and then only if new construction is on a massive scale. Once the dust has settled, rents and prices will tend to go up (more housing = more people = more specialisation = higher wages = higher rents).
Why did Google (and all the other Silicon Valley companies) decide to set up shop where they did rather than in the middle of the desert? Because they need lots and lots of employees, so they go where all the people are.
That's why rents in areas with a high population/density are higher than in areas with a low population/density. Just building more homes to try and get rents down is like throwing twigs on a fire to cool it down.
And if they allowed higher density buildings, the total rental value of each individual site goes up; instead of collecting rents from ten flats, the lucky landowner can now collects rents from twenty flats; land outside the 'zone' which gets rezoned for development sees a huge uplift. Whether the new rent-per-unit falls slightly or goes up slightly is neither here nor there.
So he has managed to turn the whole logic on its head - the share of GDP going to land owners is 'too high' and he suggests something (liberalise planning laws) which will push it even higher.
I used to get an unfair share of these, but presumably due to some EU-inspired anti-Google shite (all in the name of "freeing up competition", no doubt) Google were no longer allowed to push posts on Blogger up to the top of the list.
But I've had a couple of mildly gratifying ones today:
Of course, what Mr Schmidt and Google love isn't us Britons as individuals, but our money. The UK is the second-biggest advertising market for Google in the world, recording $4.9bn (£3.2bn) in transactions here in 2012.
Now I don't pretend to fully understand the ins and outs of how that £3.2 billion materialises, but I felt it must in some way be linked to people in the UK using that famed search engine. And based on the number of days in the year, and the numbers of hours in the day and the number of minutes in an hour and the number of seconds in a minute (I did confess to lack of competence earlier, so be fair) that, I decided with the aid of a calculator, worked out at just about £101.50 a second. And I felt reasonably sure that "just the one" search per second was unlikely to generate revenue of £100 plus, there would probably have to be "a lot of them per second" - even if each search raised as much as say the majestic sum of 2 pence for Google, well that's 5000 plus "searches" in the UK every second. That's a lot of searches. Some of which I guess will be of a "serious research type nature" conducted by businesses and others of a "serious research type nature" by people wishing to become the customers of businesses; and some of a "serious research type nature" by people seeking facts and enlightenment which could be business related, or of an educational nature, even if a lot are considered shall we say, frivolous. Now just supposing Ben got his wish and Google was subjected by the UK, and indeed just about everywhere, to "a tax levy based on how much business they do in each jurisdiction". Ben doesn't specify the level of the levy, nor ascribe a cash figure to what he expects it to generate for HM Treasury. But as this ruckus has blown up around "alleged failure to pay sufficient corporation tax" it seems safe to assume he would want the levy to equate to the amount of 'unpaid' UK corporation tax that Google is accused of dodging, and that it would be related to that £3.2 billion revenue figure.
So I just idly wondered how much that might be, and whether it would be sufficiently big enough to convince Google to start making that quite useful search engine (and yes I know there are others, so presumably any of them available in the UK would be subject to the same levy if they generated "revenue") only available on payment of some "user subscription" and how much it might be. Assuming they couldn't extract much more from the people buying their advertising (who presumably would pay extra if they felt they could pass on their extra costs to customers, but cut back their advertising if they felt they couldn't, thus probably reducing Google's UK generated revenue) because if Google really aren't making much in the way of profit in the UK, then the proposed levy is probably going to turn that into a biggish loss, and despite their "do no evil" ethos, I think they would be evil enough to think "we ain't no charity, and we certainly can't afford to be one."
Ed Miliband has criticised Google's tax arrangements at an event organised by the internet search giant. The Labour leader said the firm had gone to "extraordinary lengths" to limit levels of tax it paid in the UK.
Click and highlight to reveal the names of the only two party leaders to have complained.
I was at the same Occupy event and had also had a difference with TJN later in the day after Robin had left. TJN were majoring on multinationals and tax . I was told LVT won't work with Google for example: "because they can move their London offices to Luxembourg if we had LVT in UK". He admitted a role for LVT but not for all tax. We did not get very far due to time.
This argument applies to any re-locatable multi-national. How do you compete with tax havens under a LVT regime? Tax havens would become even more appealing under LVT presumably, because firms escape the taxing regime by settling on untaxed land overseas. So tax havens might increase in number – or have I missed something?
Best wishes
My reply:
Yes, you have missed something.
Let's assume income tax and corporation tax is nil everywhere in the world and all countries have moved to LVT-only systems.
Q: Where is the rental value of land highest? In other words: which countries get the most tax?
A: Where there are lots of people, i.e. big towns and cities, which are usually in the biggest countries (observable facts). The rental value of land in tax havens would simply not be anything special, they wouldn't be able to collect much - the current HIGH rental value of land in Monaco is merely the current value of the tax saving from living there. (And yes, if 'tax havens' decide to levy little or no LVT, then this just pushes up rents net of tax and the purchase price of land and buildings in that jurisdiction; the saving to the potential relocator is always wiped out).
But if there were no tax saving, nobody in his right mind would want to live in that concrete hellhole. Why would Google go to the trouble of relocating to Gibraltar (to minimise its tax/rent bill) when it can go to Merthyr Tidfil (to minimise its tax/rent bill)? And if reducing your rent/tax bill were the only issue, why don't all the shops on Oxford Street close down and move to Merthyr Tidfil to save rent/Business Rates?
AK Haart alerts us to Google's Ngram viewer. I chose the three words you'd expect me to choose, and as we'd expect, "land" and "rents" are being gradually brushed under the carpet and people are encouraged to talk about "tax" instead, despite the fact that land values and land rents have risen just as much as publicly collected taxes over the same period. Click to enlarge:Compare and contrast: "I don't understand your obsession with land values; we're not an agricultural society any more so land isn't important" and "We need house prices to go up to prevent banks going bankrupt, to create wealth, to stimulate the economy etc.". These statements completely contradict each other, so at best one of them is correct (actually neither is).
The other foolish claim is "Most people are owner-occupiers and don't pay rent, rent isn't important any more.". What are mortgage payments if not rent? What are land values if not capitalised rents? What is the point of owning land other than to enjoy/consume the rental value?
There's not much I'd change about the original post either, so it's nice to see that people still read it every now and then. I've done another hundred posts on the topic, but all the arguments against revolve around the same old misconceptions and untruths.
Pinched from Brian Groom's column in yesterday's FT: if you select the 'Get Directions' function in Google Maps, type in 'USA' as your starting point and 'Japan' as your destination, then item 31 on the list is genuinely quite chucklesome.
I'm not sure what I did to deserve just making it onto the first page of Google search results for Wills & Kate (out of 1.3 million results), apart from doing a cut and paste job on the front page of The Evening Standard, but hey, it's all good.
