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Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

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Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#301

Post by biztos »

Someone wrote: post #254
biztos wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If hams are fungible from a customs point of view (why would they not be?) you could try pre-curing the hams and have them ready just across the border. Ham in, ham out, ham in again, no extra trip to Spain required. Then you sell the uncured hams you needed for the stamps to a pet-food factory or for German “salami” or whatever.

They possibly need to be cured in Spain so that they can be called Spanish (e.g. Serrano or Ibérico). And I guess they aren’t fungible because they get tested for health reasons and protein content. In the EU, tracking is needed. If people get ill from eating ham, it’s important to exactly know where the meat came from (factory, farm, sometimes even the specific pig. Conversely, if animals get ill, it’s important to…

They would be cured in Spain! Before coming up to the border.

However, you have reminded me that indeed this would probably not work because of all the tracking required to prevent the Mad Swine Pox and so on.

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#302

Post by colejohnson66 »

vba616 wrote: post #216
kentonv wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Law isn't interpreted by computers, it is interpreted by human judges, who generally aren't impressed by such hacks (though you might get lucky).

Also see: structuring. You have to report behavior X, and if you deliberately don't do behavior X to avoid reporting it, that's a crime too! Let's see you put that on the blockchain...

See also: the $10k reporting threshold for banks. Deliberately doing smaller transfers to avoid the reporting threshold can be illegal (depending on intent), and the banks are legally mandated to report suspicious activity (such as that) as well.

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#303

Post by wiseleo »

withinboredom wrote: post #286
throaway46546 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard you can just bribe a cop to sign it off and you don't have to have it removed at all.

I had a drug dealer friend with a cop as a roommate. The cop “didn’t know” but he “loved to help out friends of friends.” It was entirely comical over at their house.

That sounds like a screenplay :)

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#304

Post by vba616 »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #302
vba616 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also see: structuring. You have to report behavior X, and if you deliberately don't do behavior X to avoid reporting it, that's a crime too! Let's see you put that on the blockchain...

See also: the $10k reporting threshold for banks. Deliberately doing smaller transfers to avoid the reporting threshold can be illegal (depending on intent), and the banks are legally mandated to report suspicious activity (such as that) as well.

That is what I meant.

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#305

Post by cgriswald »

8note wrote: post #297
cgriswald wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interpreter tries to understand what your code means. It doesn't try to guess at your intentions. (Pedantically, some do, but on a limited scale.) You should write quality code. You should try to anticipate edge cases. Your code will fail sometimes. You'll fix it. Law has the advantage of much more advanced interpreters; but judges should still be interpreting the law, not guessing at the minds of the people who w…

That is a source of bugs and a known failure of crypto that try to consider the code as authoritative. If interpreters could figure out the intended behaviour, there'd be fewer or no bugs. Lawmakers shouldn't be focused on bugs in written law, they should be working on new law

Law isn't code and it isn't crypto.

Judges aren't the only interpreters of law. They're simply the authoritative ones (ultimately). The law needs to be relatively authoritative so that people can make decisions around it. The whole process is actually a lot messier than such statements and there are usually valid arguments and evidence, but in general we should err on the side of least harm: which means if a law is poorly written, people might get away with something lawmakers wanted to stop. This can, and has, happened, and lawmakers deal with it by updating the law or crafting new ones. (Of course, I also think there is a distinction between the 'intent' of a law and what lawmakers intended and I really only object to basing decisions on the latter.)

Why? Because if an interpreter screws up, we update its code (or ours); but if a person screws up, we throw them in prison or fine them potentially devastating amounts. A person ought to be reasonably secure in acting in accordance with the law.

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#306

Post by dan-robertson »

young_unixer wrote: post #110
dan-robertson wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carbon taxes seem to be pretty unpopular and I think it’s a failure of imagination for climate economists to keep repeating the same idea instead of trying to find things that are more palatable.

Being against climate change and against carbon taxes at the same time basically boils down to "I want everyone else to work hard on solving this problem, except for me. I want to keep benefiting from the low prices that the pollution economy has made possible, but I don't want any pollution." I don't think there's any reasonable solution that will appease those people.

Carbon taxes appeal to economists because they are a direct incentive to stop doing the bad thing. But they are a bad policy because no one will implement them. In the past it seemed that dealing with climate change was going to require populations choosing to suffer economic loss to decarbonise the economy. But these days that seems less necessary. For example solar is cheaper than many dirty sources of power so just investing in ramping up solar power can help make it even cheaper and the economics then discourages dirty power because energy is too cheap for it to be profitable (and having cheap energy is not bad for the economy either). Subsidising hybrid[1] car purchases could be another helpful thing for emissions and doesn’t require people to feel like everything is getting more expensive.

I think the problem with carbon taxes is that they are a good solution to a negative sum game, but I think it turns out the actual game is positive sum and that carbon taxes are not an implementable solution.

[1] the big constraint with electric cars is batteries. Plug-in hybrid cars use electricity for short trips (ie most miles travelled) and so lead to more efficient use of the available batteries than electric cars that mostly use <20% of the battery capacity in a day leaving the rest unused.

Re: Adding unusable RAM for tax reasons

#307

Post by Hello71 »

Cederfjard wrote: post #139
Hello71 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

source? upon searching for "e6 ham", "norway ham tax", "e6 skinke" etc found only this post.

Quick search found this, from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation in 2014: https://www.nrk.no/norge/ellevill-skinkereise-1.11613122 Translated: https://www-nrk-no.translate.goog/norge/ellevill-skinkereise...

thanks!
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