It would be far better if we could get a government in who would use Brexit freedoms to scrap VAT and all the other sales and import taxes. They are an administrative nightmare and both unnecessary and ineffective. Stick to simpler taxes.
The problem is that we have one side who loves all things EU and the other that loves all things neoliberal - both of which are obsessed with sales taxes for some reason
VAT is not really all that complicated and accounts for around 15% of the UK tax take. Moving that to income tax would mean a substantial redistribution from working people to pensioners and incentivise moving more production abroad.
Import taxes are pretty complicated but unilaterally removing them would mean we would have nothing to negotiate tariff free access to foreign markets.
Vat is stupidly complex. Try doing an international conference for example. Not to mention the impact on imports as the OP discovered.
Quite why people think tax stays in one place is beyond me - all costs are passed on and tax is no different. Putting the tax on employer NiCS for example would result in roughly the same business collection and payment, but with a significant reduction in administration and the tax gap since PAYE collection is more efficient.
And quite why obtaining foreign items more expensive is seen as a negotiating point could only be brought up by somebody who hasn’t thought through how floating exchange rates work. We want more stuff coming in and less going out. That’s how you win in international trade. Exports are a cost remember.
As we see from the US, it is the local population that pays the cost of import tariffs and taxes. The currency exchange rate fixes the rest.
A single country's tax policies don't exist in a vacuum. Let's take as an example a new car that costs £36,000 including 20% VAT. If the UK removed VAT and put the cost on employer NICS then British built cars would still cost roughly £36,000 but foreign built cars would now cost £30,000 and what little of the British car industry is left after Brexit quickly ceases to exist as the multinational companies that run them shift production elsewhere to remain price competitive.
Trump's broad based tariffs are dumb because much of what is being tariffed is not really manufactured in the US anyway. But used in a more targeted manner they can help ensure a level playing field for your country's products in the countries you have trade agreements with. Otherwise what incentive is there for another country to negotiate a trade agreement that gives equal access to says cars manufactured in either country?
Fixed exchange rate thinking I’m afraid. Try it again but with a floating exchange rate - understanding that importers into a currency area pay the local area costs of exporters from that currency area. Reducing the tax thereby means there is more sterling available for exporters to earn.
You will find then that the exchange value is a function of productivity not currency numbers.
Moving VAT to employers NICs will impact those operations that use a lot of labour and few machines. That favours those operations that have higher productivity.
Therefore the physical cost of exports will reduce and the value of imports to the local population increase.
If that reduces the number of exporters then that is of benefit to the nation, as there are more people available to work on domestic production.
With floating exchange rates you don’t need “trade deals”. The exchange rate sorts it all out for you.
Putting rocks in your own harbour is always a silly idea. If other nations play dumping games then you fix that with subsidies not tariffs.
There is more sterling available to FX, which is where the exchange rate is set. The tax flow has been moved one step along. So the uk importer doesn’t pay the tax (on the goods), the uk exporter does (on their staff). That changes the sterling flow across the boundary and shifts the exchange rate. Quite where it settles between importers paying more and exporters receiving more is market/productivity determined.
Those processes have to be eliminated, yes. Now let's get back to talking about long term grid storage. Piggybacking storage on emissions that have to be eliminated obviously isn't a solution.
It's more expensive than hydrogen because you need to capture and store the CO2 of combustion. Extracting CO2 from the atmosphere as part of the cycle would be even more prohibitively expensive.
Except in a floating exchange rate that isn’t what happens. For somebody to leave the Eurozone for the Dollar zone there has to be somebody coming in the opposite direction to exchange with.
Macron is still talking nonsense of course. The Euros never left in the first place.
Correct. They don’t. It’s an illusion caused by where the accounting boundary is drawn.
That’s why “imbalances” never close.
If goods and services were exchanged for little models of the Eiffel Tower nobody would say there was an imbalance. Yet we do when we exchange for Euros.
We finally realise there is no such thing as a “reserve currency” in the floating exchange rate era and that the concept is a long dead hangover from fixed exchange rates.
And that’s definitely going to upset the gold bugs.
(In reality lots of things are held in reserve)
USD is a routing currency that is used because it is cheaper than the mesh alternative. When it stops being cheaper whoever is then cheapest will get the routing transactions.
> There was a time when you had to know ‘as’, ‘ld’ and maybe even ‘ar’ to get an executable.
No, there wasn't: you could just run the shell script, or (a bit later) the makefile. But there were benefits to knowing as, ld and ar, and there still are today.
> But there were benefits to knowing as, ld and ar, and there still are today.
This is trivially true. The constraint for anything you do in your life is time it takes to know something.
So the far more interesting question is: At what level do you want to solve problems – and is it likely that you need knowledge of as, ld and ar over anything else, that you could learn instead?
Knowledge of as, ld, ar, cc, etc is only needed when setting up (or modifying) your build toolchain, and in practice you can just copy-paste the build script from some other, similar project. Knowledge of these tools has never been needed.
Knowledge of cc has never been needed? What an optimist! You must never have had headers installed in a place where the compiler (or Makefile author) didn’t expect them. Same problems with the libraries. Worse when the routine you needed to link was in a different library (maybe an arch-specific optimized lib).
The library problems you described are nothing that can't be solved using symlinks. A bad solution? Sure, but it works, and doesn't require me to understand cc. (Though when I needed to solve this problem, it only took me about 15 minutes and a man page to learn how to do it. `gcc -v --help` is, however, unhelpful.)
"A similar project" as in: this isn't the first piece of software ever written, and many previous examples can be found on the computer you're currently using. Skim through them until you find one with a source file structure you like, then ruthlessly cannibalise its build script.
If you don't see a difference between a compiler and a probabilistic token generator, I don't know what to tell you.
And, yes, I'm aware that most compilers are not entirely deterministic either, but LLMs are inherently nondeterministic. And I'm also aware that you can tweak LLMs to be more deterministic, but in practice they're never deployed like that.
Besides, creating software via natural language is an entirely different exercise than using a structured language purposely built for that.
We're talking about two entirely different ways of creating software, and any comparison between them is completely absurd.
They can function kind-of-the-same in the sense that they can both change things written in a higher level language into a lower level language.
100% different in every other way, but for coding in some circumstances if we treat it as a black box, LLMs can turn higher level pseudocode into lower level code (inaccurately), or even transpile.
Kind of like how email and the postal service can be kind of the same if you look at it from a certain angle.
> Kind of like how email and the postal service can be kind of the same if you look at it from a certain angle.
But they're not the same at all, except somewhat by their end result, in that they are both ways of transmitting information. That similarity is so vague that comparing them doesn't make sense for any practical purpose. You might as well compare them to smoke signals at that point.
It's the same with LLMs and programming. They're both ways of producing software, but the process of doing that and even the end result is completely different. This entire argument that LLMs are just another level of abstraction is absurd. Low-Code/No-Code tools, traditional code generators, meta programming, etc., are another level of abstraction on top of programming. LLMs generate code via pattern matching and statistics. It couldn't be more different.
People negating down your comment are just "engineers" doomed to fail sooner or later.
Meanwhile, 9front users have read at least the plan9 intro and know about nm, 1-9c, 1-9l and the like. Wibe coders will be put on their place sooner or later. It´s just a matter of time.
Do you think most people under the age of 30 remember you can share a single computer between multiple users? When there was a single "home computer" or "PC" in the home, you learned about users and different rights. Unless you were a user back in those days or you've tinkered with any admin work, you wouldn't know this in 2026.
It's not my contention really that the UK or other nation can or can't afford to do things differently, it's more that that is the constant refrain coming from mainstream politics, along with a multitude of other excuses for relative inaction.
I’m going to disagree with the premise. The value in AI won’t come from providing AI but from using it.
The “knowledge cut off date” is 12 to 18 months ago for models, which essentially means that copyright has, in some ways, shrunk to that period since designing around is now very easy.
Given most people live on what they produced recently and not 20 years ago there’s an argument this makes access to knowledge and techniques fairer. Constant new creation is required to obtain a markup and that drives forward productivity
In other words it’s the copyright/patent argument all over again. And it’s perhaps a debate we need to have again as a service society.
The problem is that we have one side who loves all things EU and the other that loves all things neoliberal - both of which are obsessed with sales taxes for some reason
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