From Petapixel, 30/8/2022 "French Officials Use [Google] Satellite Photos and AI to Spot Unregistered Pools.
It appears that France, like Greece, taxes swimming pools. (Why? Swimming pools are not inherently a bad thing. Tax the location value of land, or charge more for mains water and electricity, job done).
From my blog, 26/6/2011:
Officially, just over 300 Kifissia residents admitted to having a pool. The true figure is believed to be 20,000. There is even a boom in sales of tarpaulins to cover pools and make them invisible to the aerial tax inspectors. ‘The most popular and effective measure used by owners is to camouflage their pool with a khaki military mesh to make it look like natural undergrowth,’ says Vasilis Logothetis, director of a major swimming pool construction company. ‘That way, neither helicopters nor Google Earth can spot them.’(5)
My footnote 5) Most pictures on Google Earth are several years old, it's too late to try and camouflage your swimming pool now.
Or, I suppose, you could cover the bottom of the swimming pool with the same slabs as the surrounding patio, instead of having it pale blue, and turn off any underwater lights so it's not so bloody obvious from space. But Google has ten or twenty years' worth of old satellite photos to sift through pre-camouflage, and they could still get you on mains water usage, or tip-offs from neighbours.
A change of heart
3 hours ago
3 comments:
"Why? Swimming pools are not inherently a bad thing."
Presumably, like the hearth tax, the window tax, the tax on watches, the tax on wigs etc, it's a tax on things that rich people have and poor people don't, or have less of.
B, sure, but it's still a stupid idea. Pools are a great source of income for pool installers, maintainers, cleaners etc.
Yes, all the other "wealth taxes" I mentioned were an unqualified disaster. When has that ever stopped the pols doing anything?
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