The fact that French authorities feel they are weaker than Google, well that's a deep concern to me.
Google is, at best, on par with them. What bother me isn't that, but how little power an individual has compared to either of those two entities.
‘Operation Tulip’ Takes Prosecutors Offline for Google Tax Raid
41–50 of 52 posts
Re: ‘Operation Tulip’ Takes Prosecutors Offline for Google Tax Raid
#42Re: ‘Operation Tulip’ Takes Prosecutors Offline for Google Tax Raid
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_militar... Technically, yes they could. And if the private sector really is more efficient, they shouldn't need the whole 50 billion. I guess what I'm saying is it would be an interesting novel that I hope never happens in real life.
this seems nonsequitur. i doubt they were suggesting that google was literally incapable of hiring mercenaries or whatever.
Yes, it was intended that way. The entire digression is. :)
Google wouldn't hire mercs anyway, they'd probably use drones and robotics and AI.
Re: ‘Operation Tulip’ Takes Prosecutors Offline for Google Tax Raid
#44Worked offline for over a year?
Did anyone ever think of the crazy solution of having one person properly configure a firewall?
Re: ‘Operation Tulip’ Takes Prosecutors Offline for Google Tax Raid
#45we worked with computers, but pretty much only with word processing The article title sounds like a sensational excuse for an otherwise technologically unsavvy group of tax agency workers.
I don't know about that. Do you think they were going to use Google Docs?
Google docs or a physical unconnected legacy word processing machine. Truly these are the only options.
Re: ‘Operation Tulip’ Takes Prosecutors Offline for Google Tax Raid
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's going to take an enormous amount of time and staffing costs. Is it? Can't they scan all of those docs in, OCR them (or process the electronic docs if they're already in that format), and use e-discovery? I hear so often on HN that legal firms no longer need junior associates or paralegals for that work, as the software can do the heavy lifting.
My wife is in law school. The work software can do is still severely limited. I personally think we are on the cusp of a revolution in this, but we aren't there yet. Watson could probably do it, if it were as important as doctoring. Software has made major strides. The old way of sending multiple copies between sides to be hand redone for each change required stupid amounts of labor. Now we have Word. But understandi…
IBM actually has a system trained on a legal corpus, used for tracking down potentially-relevant case and statute law. There isn't a huge amount of client funding in legal AI compared to other applications, and the problems are much harder than more restricted domains like medicine and pharma, but there's enough cash to do some interesting work.
Re: ‘Operation Tulip’ Takes Prosecutors Offline for Google Tax Raid
#47Re: ‘Operation Tulip’ Takes Prosecutors Offline for Google Tax Raid
#48If tax evasion is proved then the law will take its course. Not to excuse it should this happen but I'd be intrigued to know by how much the French economy has benefited by the increased trade enabled by the Google search engine. Unanswerable question I guess.
Re: ‘Operation Tulip’ Takes Prosecutors Offline for Google Tax Raid
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just Google. McDonald's, too. http://nytimes.com/2016/05/27/business/french-tax-officials-...
So only American companies?
Do you really think the french tax office just ignores domestic french tax evasion?
No. The french tax office does not exist solely to go after American companies. America giving these companies a free pass to pay little to no tax is ridiculous. They are stealing from your society.
Re: ‘Operation Tulip’ Takes Prosecutors Offline for Google Tax Raid
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
So only American companies?
Do you really think the french tax office just ignores domestic french tax evasion? No. The french tax office does not exist solely to go after American companies. America giving these companies a free pass to pay little to no tax is ridiculous. They are stealing from your society.
What French or non-American companies are they hitting for over a billion dollars? So far, we have Google (U.S.) and McDonalds (U.S.). In the past, Europe pulled same stuff on Microsoft but I don't remember if it was E.U. or what country.