TTIP Documents Revealed

I never claimed there is a minimum amount, I just said that not anything over the net is automatically subject to the new "customer's host state's VAT applies" rule.

> conflicts between the rules about VAT and other EU consumer protection rules about advertising all-inclusive prices

You can't advertise as "9.99EUR + VAT"? Or guess the VAT rate based on geo-IP location association?

What kind of services do you provide?

I agree that it's still a far cry from a great solution. First of all they have too many damned useless documents and no code at all. (At least I haven't found any.) Nor a proper infographics, or a diagram illustrating the flow.

Sorry, I don't follow. He's an expert lawyer in the field, his firm often represents governments in these actions, and he's saying that the wording doesn't protect those governments as much as they think it does and providing a very simple and clear reason for his position. Whether or not he might be biased in a courtroom or tribunal does not affect the validity of his argument about the wording.

You apply for a very costly permit, and boom, that sector has just been banned by the State, because irrational fear.

Well, that "irrational fear" followed the incident at Fukushima. That was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, and although it's too early to know the true cost in human life, most estimates expect several thousand people to die early because of evacuation conditions, cancers caused by radiation exposure, and so on. Evidently some level of concern about the safety of nuclear reactors is justified.

The question is where to draw the line. If in fact the Vattenfall reactors in Germany were not vulnerable to any similar problems and they really were closed down suddenly despite posing no risk, it seems fair that they should receive some reasonable level of compensation. On the other hand, in a case like the cigarette firms we talked about before, imposing laws that benefit human health at the expense of the business because what the business does is inherently harmful and they know it, I have little sympathy if the business loses out even if it was a direct result of the government's actions.

One could reasonably debate the forum in which such determinations might be made. However, the idea that an entire case with potentially billions of pounds of taxpayers' money hanging in the balance could sensibly be decided by just three people, behind closed doors, without any means of appeal, seems absurd to me.

tl;dr arbitration tribunals ain't saints, but they seem much more sane, egalitarian and fair, than a host country's high court (which are usually ideologically biased either traditionally or after the current regime stuffs it full of its trustees)

I see little evidence of that here in the UK. The British government can and does lose big court cases all the time, and our judiciary is fiercely defensive of its independence from the government of the day. If a foreign investor isn't willing to trust the legal system of a host nation to act reasonably, perhaps they should be investing elsewhere anyway, because there are plenty of other ways to lose huge amounts of money in that case without any hostility from the host government itself.

The main arguments against GMO essentially boil down to that they may be harmful in ways we can't yet test for. Even if we had enumerated all the ways in which things could be harmful, we wouldn't know our list was complete. You might as well ban food that hasn't been scientifically proven not to harm invisible garden gnomes.

The very reason we're creating GMOs for food is to reduce the resources (land, energy, fertilizers, water, etc.) needed for food production. The motivation of course is that lower resource usage means lower production costs.

Requiring unreasonable burdens of proof mean greater waste in our food production, but that side of things isn't a scary and therefore gets less consideration than the limitless possibilities of unknown harms that could come from GMOs.

There's some drop in the price of a hamburger below which I'm not willing to risk a Leprechaun extinction. However, I'm willing to risk extinction of Leprechauns, Yetis, and Loch Ness "monsters" in exchange for less land needed to grow my food, and fewer children being under-nourished. These are real problems that GMOs can help with.