Reminds me of when lawyers successfully argued that X-Men are not human, so that their action figures would be classified as "toys" rather than "dolls" and thus charged a lower tariff.
Wonder if you could either sue them for delivering an insufficient product (it does not function as a slipper under the definition for longer than a day after walking) or keep returning them under warranty.
Hoo boy we have some classics in that category in the UK.
My personal fave is when morning TV host Lorraine Kelly successfully argued she wasn’t hosting as herself but acting a character called Lorraine Kelly, with very favourable tax consequences.
The tribunal decided that Jaffa Cakes were cakes because when they go stale they go hard like a cake whereas a biscuit tends to go soft when it goes stale.
I remember hearing about this because the one who wanted it classified as a biscuit proposed the test that determined it was a cake. That is the sole reason I remember this story.
Absolutely- even as a lifelong leftie, I find the rhetoric on CNBC just as sickening as that on Fox.
I've (somewhat sardonically) wondered if they're both false flag operations. Imagine CNBC started with the idea "we'll parody the left to make them seem radical and unreasonable" but accidentally developed a huge following who didn't get the joke.
Thank you for pointing this out. Carlson and Maddow made nearly identical arguments in court and if both are not mentioned in the same breath, the speakers bias is instantly displayed to anyone who is educated on this topic.
> IMO they shouldn't be allowed to call themselves news without putting entertainment in front.
Agreed but the average person wouldn't understand that Entertainment News was different than News. The problem goes deeper. I despair.
Carlson's texts were wild, they proved that he knew he was spreading lies and did it anyway for views. That's why Fox settled with Dominion for $787 million dollars.
Meanwhile, OAN sued Maddow for calling them Russian propaganda and her lawyers responded by flexing, doubling down with receipts under oath. Signing up for consequences if they were wrong, and receiving none because they were correct.
So no, these are not the same, and anyone who argues that they are immediately reveals themselves to be partisan hacks.
[Judge Smith] found OAN and its parent company were unlikely to prevail on the defamation claim because the challenged speech was not a statement of fact and the context of Maddow’s show made it likely her audience would expect her to make political opinions.
Putting the details of the court case aside, the judge is clearly saying that he does not believe that Maddow's show was "news" and it shouldn't be treated as such. That's what GP was pointing out: the defense of being "not news", which both shows have in common.
Nope. You paid very selective attention to that article:
> the context provided by Maddow’s commentary before and after she made the statement disclosed all relevant facts and contained colorful language.
If you listen to the clip in question, you'll observe that Maddow explains the facts, makes an exclamation, and then explains the facts. The complaint here only works if you clip chimp the exclamation. Contrast this with the complaint against Carlson, where he engages in what was by his own admission sustained deception.
> the average person wouldn't understand that Entertainment News was different than News
I think the 'average' person thinks of 'Entertainment News' as celebrity gossip, e.g., E! News[0] etc. Telling them the entertainment news/opinion/commentary they watch is not actually 'News' but is entertainment "news" doesn't compute
What Fox News argued was a bit more nuanced than that all of Fox News isn't news. Rather, "Fox successfully argued that one particular segment on Tucker Carlson’s show could only be reasonably interpreted as making political arguments, not making factual assertions, and therefore couldn’t be defamation."[1]
That feels like a fairly reasonable assertion for anybody watching Tucker Carlson.
Well, context matters in looking at defamation claims.
Let's say you were involved in a freak hunting accident and shot somebody, but you were never charged with any crimes.
If the Fox News "hard news" program (if such a thing exists) said "skrebbel is a murderer" that is more likely to be understood to be a statement of fact, asserting something in a legalistic sense. [IANAL, but I think even this is unlikely to be defamation, although there is a somewhat similar case where ABC settled with Donald Trump over saying he was "liable for rape"]
If somebody on Tucker Carlson Tonight said "You can't trust anything that skrebbel guy says, he's a murderer!" that is more likely to be understood as an opinion based on disclosed facts, not a fact. That person isn't asserting that you committed or were convicted of a specific crime of murder, but rather that you killed somebody and it might be your fault. On a show were people are arguing and exchanging opinionated views, viewers should understand that these things are opinions. And therefore that's not defamation, because it's an opinion.
Isn't it also how, many years ago, Top Gear got away with a hit job on Tesla by claiming they're just an entertainment show, so they're not obligated to do honest or truthful reviews?
Alex Jones argued this, with the obvious implication, that whoever buys Infowars also owns the character of Alex Jones, and Alex Jones cannot play Alex Jones any more without infringing their copyright. (But I suspect this incoming government doesn't care to apply logical consistency to his case)
And then when he tried using the "Steven Colbert" character on a different show,
Comedy Central threatened him because Steven Colbert does not have rights to the "Steven Colbert" character.
Al Shugart started Shugart Associates and pretty much created the 5 1/4" floppy market. He sold to Xerox. He later started Shugart Technology and was promptly threatened with a lawsuit because he literally had sold his rights to his own name (in the particular context). He changed the name to Seagate Technology and the rest is history.
Yes, you can be enjoined from using your own name.
> Yes, you can be enjoined from using your own name.
This is not that case.
In popular media when "The Colbert Report" was broadcast, Steven Colbert was very open about the fact that he was playing a character on TV who happened to have the same name as him.
In the case of "The Tonight Show featuring Steven Colbert," he is not playing the character from the Colbert Report.
The very specific bit was from after the 2017 election when Trump was elected. Steven Colbert did a bit, in character as "Steven Colbert", with props from "The Colbert Report", and a guest appearance from Jon Stewart. (Because the main focus of "The Colbert Report" was to mock conservatives.) Otherwise, everything Steven Colbert (the person) does on "The Tonight Show featuring Steven Colbert" does not involve the "Steven Colbert" character from "The Colbert Report."
And that's when he stopped being funny. As a big fan I was confused by how unfunny his tonight show content was from day one compared to everything we saw upto that point. I can see why legal action when nowhere it's not the same product. Using the same name does cause confusion in the marketplace.
To be fair, in Steven Colbert's case, he definitely was playing a character on The Colbert Report. A ridiculously conservative one that asked guests repeatedly if George W. Bush was a great president, or the greatest president. It was very over the top.
Yep- if Pee-wee Herman’s character were instead named after the actor, Paul Reubens, that character could still be licensed/sold. Paul Ruebens could still do interviews, and take jobs under that name, without permission, but he’d better not show up in the Pee-wee outfit.
If there were any tax implications, they were incidental. The show was parody, so the opinions he espoused in character were necessarily ones he didn't actually hold.
Yes, Jaffa Cakes - minature sponge cakes flavoured with Jaffa oranges. Cakes aren't subject to Value Added Tax in the UK, which allows them to be sold more cheaply to the consumer or have a greater profit margin. A tribunal confirmed that they are true, real and genuine cakes, so you may feel entitled to enjoy your tax-free treat!
In a way it's not completely tax-free; the embodied costs of producing and selling the cake are still taxed with employee income tax, National Insurance, import duties and so on.
The UK's exemption from VAT covers lots of things, but not an entirely logical selection: cakes are considered staples and are exempt, but drinks (including soft drinks, beer and mineral water) are taxed at the full 20% rate.
In general, I would personally prefer that the UK not have VAT, as it's a regressive tax (people with lower incomes pay a greater percentage of their income on it than high earners do).
I think basic and healthy foods should be VAT exempt. Bread, milk, eggs, vegetables, fruit (maybe not fruit that needs to be shipped from South America or Africa), water etc. Also maybe school books and newspapers and of course medicine. Sugary drinks _should_ be taxed.
Sales tax is horrendously regressive and during a war you will find that things like cakes and biscuits are not actually frivolous at all. We drink a lot of tea.
The window tax features prominently in a visual novel video game (The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles), which also contains a bunch of wildly outlandish historical nonsense and characters like mad-scientist inventors, teleportation devices, and Sherlock Holmes types. I was blown away to learn the window tax was actually a real thing, not something silly just made up for the game.
I had a friend that argued that Marshall Mathers (Eminem) could never actually be sued for defamation because most of the defamatory things "he" said wasn't actually him saying it, but Slim Shady.
Sounds insane. But what is more surprising to me - is why dolls were taxed differently than other toys. At first glance, it looks like stupid rules force to play silly games.
In India, the pizza base has a different tax rate than the topping and so some restaurants will have two separate lines on your pizza bill - one for the base at 5% tax and another for the topping at 18% tax.
The tax on popcorn is also totally crazy. "Unpackaged and unlabelled popcorn with salt and spices is categorised as 'namkeen' and taxed at 5%. Pre-packed and labelled ready-to-eat popcorn attracts a 12% GST rate. Caramelized popcorn with added sugar is taxed at a higher rate of 18%."
What I think is happening is that the place is specifically charging different tax rates for each part of the pizza. That does seem odd but the alternative would be to tax the whole of the pizza at a higher tax rate than the one presented. Example, most countries might put a whole pizza at, say, 10% VAT, while here part of it is at, say, 4% and the rest at 10%. Ideally that's cheaper.
The pizza thing seemed incredibly silly to me. Surely the restaurant has already paid the tax when they bought the raw ingredients? Must any product served in a restaurant be taxed according to the rate of the most highly taxed ingredient in it, regardless of proportion?
So I looked it up. And yes, that is exactly the case, and it's an absurd situation that is causing massive headaches.
Or my shirt that has a tiny, useless pocket on the inside of my shirt (down where it might often be tucked inside of your waistband.) It has a tag with a picture of sunglasses on it, and a reasonably sized pair of sunglasses might just tenuously perch inside.
This makes it a jacket, and jackets are taxed at a lower rate than shirts.
The same shenanigans more or less work for most types of taxation. There’s always an angle to reduce or even eliminate taxes, unless you work on salary or for wages. It’s clear who the system is built for lol.
It’s a silly world where people who never worked send people who only worked as mobsters to take money from people who work for a living. Then the first two groups share that money in 999999:1 proportion. They call it “taxation”.
It has upsides like having an army for defense, roads and other common things. But don’t forget the primary nature and motivation behind it. They just want your money, and your offspring to please them in various ways.
This reminds me of maybe the worst tax in human history which is also unconstitutional. The Pauschalabgabe[0] in Germany, which also got adopted in other countries, implements a freely decidable flatrate tax on all mediums which can be used to create a pirated copy.
How much tax for a laser printer? Well it depends how fast it prints:
Up to 14 pages/Minute: 25,00 €
Up to 39 pages/Minute: 50,00 €
From 40 pages/Minute: 87,50 €
For every storage medium this tax has been paid, because of the possibility of making a pirated copy. Technically we all paid already to make pirates copies.
Isn't this also what allows people to create copies for personal use, and what makes downloading pirated media legally clear, and only producing/distributing illegal? Sounds like a fine tradeoff, as fixing IP laws (and international treaties) is way too hard of a problem.
It’s the other way around the law got created because of the possibility of private copies and their fear of profit loss. A private copy is only legal if the source is legal. Circumventing copy protection makes it illegal.
Pirated copies and temporary copies like streaming are afaik grey areas because the difficulty to prove and not a trade off.
I believe it was sold into the US market originally. I bought it second hand in a secondary market that sources its used articles primarily from the USA and Canada.
It would actually be way to miss. If it hadn’t been marked with a sunglasses emblem, I would have easily thought it was just a gusset. It’s just one of the bottom front corners of the left side of the shirt, with a triangular gusset that is big enough to just hold 2/3 of a pair of glasses, mesh, in this particular case.
This sort of thing happens relatively often; Sony also tried (unsuccessfully) to have the PS2 deemed a personal computer (which would have lead to 0 tariffs in the EU): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yabasic#PlayStation_2
I often wonder what the ROI is on this. How much did Sony have to pay engineers to implement this interesting but seemingly pretty useless functionality vs. what it actually saved them in the aforementioned tariffs? I know the knee jerk reaction is to say it obviously saved them some money or they wouldn't have done it, but I've seen far too much corporate stupidity in my life to take that as a given. I'd love to see the data.
Well, in the end it didn't save them anything, because the EC didn't accept that having a toy basic interpreter made what was obviously a games console a PC. I can't imagine it was terribly expensive in the scheme of things, though.
If it can run a desktop linux environment it's a PC. That said it probably should only count if the preinstalled software is Linux and not some games OS.
When you ship millions of units of the kit, you only need a small savings per unit for the sum total to become a big enough saving to be noticeable to the financial dept. bean counters.
Maybe it was just a passion project for the engineers or even Ken Kutaragi ? See also Net Yarose, Linux For Playstation 2, Other OS & Yellow Dog Linux for Playstation 3.
Or when the makers of Jaffa Cakes baked a giant 12 inch version[1] and brought it to the court to argue they were cakes and not biscuits to get lower VAT.
Most UK bikkies are meh, though. I have to import ones from NZ here to survive.
Mallowpuffs are so much better than tea cakes. Squiggles, Tim tams, chit chats, sultana pasties, griffins macaroons, toffee pops, hundreds and thousands, mint slice.
Whereas here it's mostly shortbread or bourbons/custard creams.
Whoa, whoa, wait a minute! I can't have POLITICS in my comics, my comics are apolitical, there's good guys and bad guys, and it's always clear who the bad guys are - those that are not [like] me! /s
Sounds like Ford putting seats in the back of their vans so they could pay less tax when importing them from Mexico, then removing them before they're sold. Looks like they've now been fined, but they got away with it for a while.
I wonder if there is any place where one can look up all these sort of creative legal-tax shenanigan stories. They are so fun and such an interesting lens to see what _is_ via this interlinked, case-specific web of events.
When Trump set a tariff on German optics because he was mad at Germany, Leica had a workaround as well.
Most of their equipment is made in Portugal and finished in Germany, with whatever WTO agreed % of value added that allows them to stamp "Made In Germany" on the goods.
So for US markets they issues a series of lenses that were more fully finished in the Portuguese factory such that they could be stamped "Made In Portugal".
Most quantitative recruitment criteria are arbitrary to some degree. Unless you rigorously examine every single applicant, you need some heuristics for initial filtering.
On the contrary, from a moral standpoint you owe your children everything. You forced them into existence without their consent.
Though I agree that doesn't have to mean conforming to societal expectations of ivy league schools and so forth. Food, love and a roof over your head goes a long way.
I cannot put my finger on why I dislike this comment so deeply but I am a parent and I suspect you are not.
To be specific I dislike your framing and use of the word "forced". I do agree though that parents should deeply love and support their kids which is what it sounds like you are trying to say. And in turn, your kids should do the same despite "generational differences".
> I cannot put my finger on why I dislike this comment so deeply but I am a parent and I suspect you are not.
I am also a parent.
> I do agree though that parents should deeply love and support their kids which is what it sounds like you are trying to say.
Loving your kids is not a moral obligation, though most do (for the record, I love mine very much).
Supporting your kids is a moral obligation, whether you love them or not, incurred by creating them.
> And in turn, your kids should do the same despite "generational differences".
I disagree. Our kids will never be morally obligated towards us in any way. We can only hope to have loved and supported them enough for them to love and support us back of their own volition.
> I disagree. Our kids will never be morally obligated towards us in any way. We can only hope to have loved and supported them enough for them to love and support us back of their own volition.
I agree with this. Kids can't willingly bring themselves into the world (although "forced" is an exaggeration), and the burden is on their parents. A kid, until a certain point, is a person with certain needs and restrictions that call for external supervision (e.g. needing shelter, not voting). I consider a person in general to not have inherent obligations beyond not killing and whatnot. Sure, I can ditch my friend in a socially awkward moment and that would make me a huge jerk, but surely it doesn't rise to the same level as hitting someone.
> Loving your kids is not a moral obligation, though most do (for the record, I love mine very much). Supporting your kids is a moral obligation, whether you love them or not, incurred by creating them.
I don't quite know what you mean by "loving" versus "supporting". To me, supporting sounds like loving, with the caveat that I think emotional care ties into supporting a kid. Do you mean extra things like buying more presents on holidays?
Maybe. "Forced" implies "against their will", and prior to existing they of course had no will to oppose. It seems like you know what I mean though, and I'll try to think of less harsh verbiage for my point.
> I don't quite know what you mean by "loving" versus "supporting". To me, supporting sounds like loving, with the caveat that I think emotional care ties into supporting a kid. Do you mean extra things like buying more presents on holidays?
I may have been overly pedantic in separating them. By "love" I mean the actual emotion, which can never be forced or obligated. By "support" I mean everything we do for our kids. And part of supporting our kids is making sure they never doubt that we love them, which perhaps renders the difference moot.
Disagree philosophically, there was no "them" to consent prior to them existing, so no one was forced. I think this is gesturing at Benatar's antinatalist argument but as you'll recall it rests on a metaphysical asymmetry here I have just never found convincing. Appreciate you keeping the pushback civil, however.
True, no one is asked whether or not they would like to be born and then forced into it after disagreeing, but once they are brought into existence they will experience suffering in life, does anyone ever desire such suffering for themselves?
Seems to me that parents should want to minimize that suffering, even if I also disagree with “owing them everything” as parents should also help them to grow into self-sufficient beings. It’s a tough balance to strike and I won’t pretend to be an expert on it, I’m only just getting started myself.
Ceteris paribus everyone wants to minimize the suffering of another. All the more when it's your own child. That's very different from having a moral obligation towards them to minimize their suffering, which is the thrust of my original post.
The thing is the vast majority of people find living to be on the whole a source of great joy, far greater than any suffering they may experience as a byproduct of it. The handful who don't do have the option, grim as it may be to consider, of returning to nonexistence. The fact that this option isn't taken by even 1% of people suggests strongly that nonexistence just isn't that compelling an alternative.
If every generation is expected to sacrifice themselves for the next, it kind of begs the question of what is the point of it all. Having some reciprocal balance makes more sense to me.
One can also turn around your moral argument: Your children owe you everything, since they wouldn’t exist at all without you.
It's interesting to compare this perspective with religious teachings which tend to say that kids owe everything to their parents ("honor") and that parents responsibility is to train their kids with good moral character (on top of food, love & shelter).
As a parent you want to give them everything but you then have to balance that against realities & other priorities. That's part of the training of a good moral character: learning to manage life's limitations & your response to those limitations.
I'm not qualified to interpret results, but this paragraph stuck out to me:
> Using mice for the study, the researchers found that heart muscle also decreased in both obese and lean mice. The systemic effect observed in mice was then confirmed in cultured human heart cells.
So it also happened for already lean mice (though no mention of whether they still lost fat), and for cultured human heart cells (so not a by-product of needing less muscle to pump blood through a shrunken body).
This looks like such a fun product. Similar to another commenter, I don't think it's all that useful, since the tactility of the physical dice roll is such a big part of tabletop gaming (for many people at least). But to me, watch complications are not so much about utility as they are about being cool for its own sake.
I would love to see something like this made into a mechanical watch complication.
If you programmed a machine to flip a coin in the same exact way every time, would you not expect the coin to land the same way every single time? If you program some randomness into the machine to simulate human flipping, then you'd simply move scrutiny from the coin to the machine's programming.
I think the result could be better described as "humans tend to flip fair coins to land on the side they started".
I usually understand "dark matter" to be shorthand for the discrepancy between theory and observation. The explanation might indeed be matter that is dark, or it might be solved by entirely unexpected observations and/or changes to theory.
Not really. You might think this after watching Angela Coulliers video, but when you read something like "25% of the universe's energy content is made of dark matter", they do not mean changes to some theory. They literally mean non-baryonic matter.
Nope. It can mean change to some theory, without a need for matter. It is the difference between relativistic gravity and the corresponding observed mass.
I hate that my first thought was "why isn't the apple music button monetized with their affiliate tag". Thanks for doing something cool for cool's sake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Biz%2C_Inc._v._United_Stat...