too complicated

Spending time watching parliamentary debate. They are talking about a new digital services tax. Why do we need a special tax bill for individual services?

Just tax anybody for anything they sell for profit in any particular country. That makes things much easier. There is one principle to get part of the profits.

We need two taxes for every company, a proft of sale tax to replace VAT and a corporation tax.

Every sale that goes into a sales spreadsheet, has the buyer’s address on it, so from that record, the profit of sales taxes will be declared in the country of the customer.

All that argument whether online services damage local business are not relevant. As we all have seen the current Covid-19 crisis made local shops close whilst online services like Amazon could deliver those goods.

On the other hand should a global technical crisis shut digital services down, then we’ll rely on local shops more.

What it needs is full flexibility to manage any eventuality.

Paying profit of sales taxes directly to the country of the customer will resolve a lot of problems like import or export tariffs.

Any corporation tax will have to be paid to the country of residence.

We need to get away from trying to establish principles that force governments to keep local high streets open as a matter of first priority.

I could not get the same selection in a local shopt as I can get it on Amazon. Also from environmental consideration, any business storing stock centrally will have less environmental carbon footprint than a company who has to shop goods to a local display location and then back to the customer.

The footfall in any locality attracts less buyers than an online sales outlet can. I reckon we need to produce much more goods to display them in every corner of the world than we need to produce to display them online and sell them to any location on the globe.

If we produce just to display in any geographical location we produce much more carbon than if we produce to display online and then sell to all who want.

That way, with only 2 taxes levied, and profits being paid directly to the country of the consumer and country of business host, we enable business to settle production anywhere, where they can get the best corporation tax rate and the best transport and storage conditions for their goods.

TV ads instead of demos

Whilst Extinction Rebellion are trying to sell us their story, they do so by stopping traffic, apologetic, no less, they cause a disturbance.

They say, they need to do this, to make us aware of the climate agenda.

But, what about taking out a TV ad instead. You cannot reach more people than with a TV ad. XR got lots of money, they have extremely rich sponsors, so TV ads, should be affordable for them.

And as it is such a good cause, ITV or other commercial channels may even chip in and half the price?

Apparently the Chief Medical officer, constantly appears in between our favourite program to remind us of corona Virus dangers, he wouldn’t dream stopping traffic to remind a few drivers of the dangers.

Obviously XR want to use the issue to radicalise ‘rebel’s, teach them how to interrupt and feel good about it. They use and abuse us to train political resistance.

paying for use of email address

As a webmaster, I directly hire web space URL hosting space from hosting providers. For the general population, when you use BT services they give you email addresses you can use and when you leave you can keep your old email address for free or for paying a price.

BT would allow you 10 email addresses others have various rules. Sky and Virgin also give you bundles of email addresses, which you can create yourself and use.

My webspace providers wants to charge me over £12.25 per year for the use of one email address name over a period of 10 years. That costs a whopping £122.

Amazing prices. Yet, is it not in the best interest of service providers to let you keep your email address as the more they change the harder it is to trace communications.

Talking of continuation. It is very worrying that there are discussions to dismantle the BBC as on their website, there is a wealth of information and getting rid of the BBC would also stop those web pages being published. Those web pages are like an online library of history.

Every website that links to those web pages will have dead ends. Not very good.

Steady communications, including email addresses are very important for our security. Constantly changing media will make it impossible to trace. Just look how criminal gangs use burner phones. They only switch on when in use, then get disbanded. If we get the same thing with emails, life will be much more unsafe for us.

 

The cookie saturation

Just mentioned on a blog a couple of days ago that I am currently suffering from Plantar Fasciitis and promptly today, whilst I play a game online, during the advertising break, I get an ad stating that there is an ideal gadget to help me in the mornings. If I only buy this item and put it on in the mornings, my foot problems, due to Plantar Fasciitis, will be much better.

Of course that is a result of cookies and algorithms re-calling matching ads, fed into some database by companies seeking customers, that then are played during my games to me to make me buy this item.

Of course that principle of making people use free market economy solutions would work if people had unlimited amounts of money to buy what somebody produces somewhere and then get it shipped to them.

Would we really still need doctors, a National Health that prescribes established medications to those wanting certified solutions rather than promoted ones?

When I search anything into a search engine, promptly following on from that for several days, I will get inundated with ads about articles relating to that search.

It’s just like that once an interest is shown that then gets thrown back into our faces again and again with the hope that we spend money on that item.

If we would have no other option than to buy what is being offered to us in case of a need, then we would probably end up getting back to woodoo or witch-craft solutions rather than optimised nationally approved medicines.

Where is the quality control and who checks what type of products get advertised to us? Those freedom of market economy gurus would be able to set the standards if they are the only ones having the power to provide solutions.

Probably Human Rights standards is the only mechanism that saves us from those wanting to sell us anything that goes without making sure we have enough money to buy the stuff.

We need nationalisation

Just listening to the Jeremy Corbyn speech announcing free broadband for everybody and a part-nationalisation of BT.

Of course it is – in my view – a national security measure. Unfortunately on a private basis the providers cannot afford nor finance the layout of fibre broadband to remote and hard to access areas.

Those areas are already exploited by criminal gangs who use them to import people for slavery and drugs.

Without the widespread broadband Britain is highly vulnerable as it is accessible through a lot of remote areas, which themselves are not secured.

So we do need a Labour Party because private finance is unable to raise the money to implement this new utility.

It will most likely attract a lot of investment into Britain if businesses can access that free fibre broadband anywhere in the country.

I have noticed the change in broadcasters attitude towards the ususal Tory arguments, which normally rubbish everything Labour but now they are more careful to allow this. Interviewers now ask the Conservatives, please tell us your policies, we know how much you dislike Labour policies.

Whilst through years of Tory government all of our nation’s administrative mechanisms have been based on private financy initiatives and even our pension schemes depend on private savings and company pension schemes now, the business world has finally realised that they are unable to cope on private ownership alone.

It will take a re-think but it is seriously necessary to re-nationalise certain industries for our national security.

Austerity and privatisation don’t match

It is more than stupid from this modern Conservative government to introduce more privatisation whilst at the same time driving us further into austerity. Only a well developing economy can support more and more privatisation but privatisation can never prosper under austerity because private firms rely on profits and if they do not make profits, they cannot deliver service.

The latest attempts to further dismantle pensions are a clear proof of this. Care for disabled and elderly people has clearly deteriorated in private homes. The alternative suggested by Duncan Smith and his pals is to dismantle pensions as we know them as well and have the very old looked after by the elderly. I feel sorry for the very old already.

Just imagine what type of patchy care a very old and frail person would receive if looked after by an elderly person who themselves have greater health-care needs.

It has been established for around 200 years in the western world, and we were promised by the governments, that if we pay our 1st class, 2nd class or so contributions then we get a pension from age 60 – 65. That was then slowly dismantled by starting to close the age gap between men and women and now there is a suggestion to get rid of pensions altogether by making old people volunteer for their pensions.

Has Great Britain become a rip-off society? Clearly it is a simple breach of contract to promise people a pension if they pay insurance contributions or stamps as they are also known by, in exchange for a pension when they then don’t get a pension.

I think pensioners would have a case asking for their money back if they get their pension cut off despite having paid their contributions over their lifetime and then get their pensions reduced or cut off for any reason other than not having paid enough contributions.

Unfortunately Iain Duncan Smith is the driving force behind that move, he is currently in charge of Works and Pensions and one of the few ministers that escapes a change in the recent cabinet re-shuffle.

Of course we see also that complaints about health services have soared since health care has been partly privatised, since the NHS has been slowly dismantled and we have seen whole health care trusts going deep into the red. What is the cause of our care problems is not only increasing old age, it is the privatisation of services, lets just be clear about that.

E-publishing

YouTube has been found to be responsible for the copyright of music despite the E-commerce regulations and the German court decided that an Internet publisher should install filters to prevent the posting of copyright material but that is in my view a very laborious an unworkable concept. There are only 2 possibilities, its either only allowing approve material or charging U-Tube a universal license per month, quarter, annum, which is much more practicable and workable.

Asking a large company like YouTube to pay for each clip played, would be similar to charging a pub for each piece of music they play to their customers but such companies pay a universal license fee instead.

Is advertising family friendly?

I was very impressed to read about the ‘Mothers Union’ and how it seeks to protect children that grow up in an ever increasing sexualized world, whereby children  are confronted by sexy advertising bill boards and similar material on and off the net. It’s almost part of our daily lives.

Commercial advertisements are made for those who can spent money and that are often the single workers who have got the cash to spare. Cash-strapped families are not so much a target for large scale ad campaigns. Children friendly advertising hits us each year before Christmas and its worst here in the UK than in other parts of Europe where ads for toys are not even allowed to that extent, that we see here regularly.

There are then the Christmas song choices and competitions and I must say that the lyrics of today’s pop songs are often very sexualized and make you think about one thing alone. That without any doubt, influences how children look at persons and personal relationships. I am personally bored by today’s trivial music, which leaves little to the imagination and find the half-naked stage shows unattractive.

Whilst parents in the past tried to avoid the talk about reproduction and sexual things completely, they now have no choice because its not only in music videos, music lyrics, street posters and on the Internet but also the schools give sexual awareness lessons.

One can make too much fuss and bring children’s minds around to thinking about this when otherwise they would not really be interested at all. The Bailey Child sexualisation review has asked for a review of porn control, which is very much needed. I understand that Internet service providers find it workable to put better Internet access controls for families, yet it is extremely easy for a child at present to register with Facebook for example because all a child has to do is put in a fictional date of birth and he presto the membership is accepted. So if that works for Facebook so easy, it will work for others equally easy.  Sites like Facebook are very user-friendly and families even welcome the site for easy communications with family and friends locally and across the globe.

Putting the responsibility in parents’ hands is not so easy because being on the Internet is very much an individual activity, each person is alone with the computer terminal they are sitting on. Putting on strict controls on adult content often results in not being able to see many web pages, which hinders Internet research.

Maybe it would be possible to put an inbuilt control into each new sold machine, that at the time of starting it up, the responsible adult has to enter the children that are likely to use the machine and that all activities requiring a certain age have to be approved by the adult in charge of the machine, this must include e-mail verification of memberships such as Facebook.

Yet the key to all remote and electronic communications is the proof of whom you are actually talking to and that is especially important for children. I think face to face contact is the most important point on computer communications and if a child can see the other persons they speak to it removes a lot of the uncertainty and misuse of the system. The best system to use in my view is the MSN / Windows live messenger, whereby people can actually see each other whilst they communicate over the Internet. Most laptops have inbuilt cameras these days. Often abuse takes place by adults pretending to be children and they coax children to meet them just to reveal their real age, that is not possible if children can actually see whom they talk to at the initial stage.

The voice of families is often not properly taken into account when advertising strategies are decided and therefore I welcome this call to include children’s and families’ needs into commercial policy considerations.

Throughout my experience with community work I realised that families never come to meetings and  I assume it is the same in commerce, it is that single people have  more time to meet and make policies that then affect families. It is this method that is responsible for commercial strategies running away with themselves. Families, parents need to be better consulted in many aspects of today’s commercial, artistic and public campaigns.

There is no value to Internet anonymity

There are not only the Twitter users but also many bloggers who prefer not to disclose to the general public who is behind their postings and I think that should change. Many posts have no proper informal value and only serve to spread unease. Bullying campaigns are led from nameless blogs and social networks.

If anybody wishes to make a point, they should do so, saying who they are, so they can give that point a weight. Any comments made anywhere, which are not underwritten by a proper person are without any value and just a wast of time. Nobody can take them serious and nobody can take any action over them. Yet if there are too many rumours spread, people get discredited in the popular opinion regardless how baseless the rumours are.

Often anonymous rumour machines make the work of the police and other public bodies much more difficult because for example security services have so much more to do to find out whom they are dealing with or whom they can ignore.

If anybody has a proper grievance, that has to be properly complained about or no authority needs to even take notice of it. So what is the point of these naonymous bloggers, tweeters? I think that can only be answered by those who get satisfaction of publishing from the safety of anonymity.

Maybe the act of anonymous publishing in itself has a name in the archives of mental health specialists.

In business anybody wanting to trade online must make their identify clearly known on their website but individuals get the freedom of total anonymity. So it is quite possible that a person has respectatility but they then put on the cloak of the bully and start writing rubbish about others. Mind you not only bloggers seem to lead double lives these days. I cannot support the argument of the Twitter blogger who fears his account deetails stop others from airing their grievances via his account.

Cameron’s vision for East End tech hub hailed by academics – News – East London Advertiser

Cameron’s vision for East End tech hub hailed by academics – News – East London Advertiser.

I am as usual years ahead of developments because I started my high-tech business in 1999, years ahead of today’s developments. It can only be welcomed by local residents that plans are in place to make something of the East End of London. Away go the criminal undertones when thinking about East London, in come the aspirations and good ideas, well done David Cameron.