Comment by chii
6 hours ago
How come tax loopholes aren't as scrutinized?
Mandatory age verification online is a blight imho. It should be outlawed.
6 hours ago
How come tax loopholes aren't as scrutinized?
Mandatory age verification online is a blight imho. It should be outlawed.
I agree, age verification on the web should 100% banned.
Parents should learn how to be parents; the government shouldn't force companies to do parenting instead.
Governement should force companies to give parental controls tools. Gaming companies like Nintendo and Steam do that, I can create a kid account with parental controls.
Social media companies (e.g. Meta, Snap) are the first that should provide that but they don't.
Band and severely punish systematic violations of privacy.
Regulate the poison first, not the access to it. All this age verification nonsense is an admission that some platforms knowingly harm their users. And instead of fixing the issue by cracking down on the proverbial crack, governments make everybody's life worse.
I remain hopeful that one day, humans will regard the online advertising companies with the same scorn we do the tobacco industry and may they be ashamed and disgusted at our inaction.
So you're implying alcohol and cigarettes should be sold to children?
(Not to mention all the other consent age laws.)
That said, VPN is a national security issue, children are only a pretext.
What does national security even mean anymore? People are using this term for basically everything these days, as if saying "national security" is somehow a justification on its own.
What "national security" implications are there with VPNs?
Children have always found ways to access age restricted consumables. Whether that was porno mags, alcohol or cigarettes.
They’d just get an older sibling, or stranger to buy it. Or they’d have a fake ID. Or they’d just steal it from a family member.
But you know which kids did this the least? It was the ones where their parents / guardians took their responsibilities as a guardian properly.
4 replies →
> VPN is a national security issue
:/
A tax "loophole" is just a deliberate policy you happen to disagree with.
What makes you think they aren't? The Double-Irish-Dutch-Sandwich in particular was cracked down on.
Just the fact that it takes NGOs and journalists to uncover tax evasion practices. The governments and tax offices aren't looking. CumEx was a scandal in 2017, and despite being known since 1992, has only recently led to just a handful of prosecutions.
Cumex was not a tax loophole it was straight up fraud .
1 reply →
To be replaced by the Irish tax department making direct deals that are essentially the same. But ONLY for specific companies (principle: big multinationals don't pay tax at all, local companies get big tax raises. Irish companies are dying, multinationals are moving to Ireland)
https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/ireland/corporate/tax-credits-a...
In case anyone wonders: this means the FANG companies don't pay tax in Ireland if they hire enough people in Ireland, which has famously high income tax. It is, in other words, effectively a massive tax increase on the employees while actually reducing total tax income in the EU compared to the "double dutch sandwich".
Note that Ireland signed at least 2 international treaties that they weren't going to do this (OECD minimum tax treaty, EU tax treaty). Of course, there are no consequences to this.
The response to is that EU is exploring company-tax-per-transaction which is so incredibly bad in the massive administrative burden it will generate. It's not final, but it will mean that for every transaction done companies will have to keep (PER transaction) pieces (plural) of evidence for what country they happened in. Every single transaction.
https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/projects-and-acti...
Lots of governments give tax exemptions to selected industries (film comes to mind) or even companies (Foxconn/TSMC); I don’t support this behavior, but I don’t see what makes Ireland special in this regard.
1 reply →
How can you define a tax loophole then? Since there isn't a thing you can do called a "Tax loophole", but rather a collection of otherwise totally legitimate practices, just used as an optimization, they are impossible to define, and as such, be scrutinized. It's a neverending whack-a-mole...
Why? Isn't your age verified when you renew your drivers license? Purchase something on Amazon?
When I was a kid, child programming and commercials were heavily scrutinized. Now any kid can access porn, violence, and scams on the internet. That's a blight. Not age verification.
I don’t understand, did broadcast TV or cable do age verification? Surely kids could watch content that was for adults very easily.
Broadcast TV had a very simple solution to this problem: Only air the not-for-kids stuff at times of the day when the kids are already asleep, i.e. late in the evening or at night.
It was still the job of the parents to set the bed times etc, but at least this was something the parents could actually control.
And for pay-per-view stations with actual heavily violent or pornographic content: Yes, they were absolutely age-gated, usually via a PIN.
2 replies →
As a kid, you never found a stack of porno magazines in the woods did you?
> Now any kid can access porn, violence, and scams on the internet.
Before Internet they used paper.
The ease of access, quantity and diversity of internet porn is in no common measure with magazines that existed in the 20th century.
That’s the job of parents. No exceptions. OP is right, it needs to be outlawed.