The problem is that law is a malleable mater and not all interpretation and use should be accepted, there is the spirit and the letter (don't know if it's an usual expression in english).
Dunno muchabout the US tax code but in the french tax code when there is a tax break there are practical conditions and an information intention / context by the legislative assembly in the law project. If french deputies create a tax break to incentivize research and you use it to get a tax break given investment in infrastructure not at all linked to any research, even if you match the practical conditions it's considered an abuse/diverting of the law and the french tax administration can completely cancel your tax break and you'll have to sue them in our administrative justice branch to change their decision.
That sounds like a nightmare for the business owner, and a huge boon for the legal industry (aka lawyers). Uncertainty/ambiguity in law is poisonous for someone trying to operate in the law, and that goes for everyone from big corp to individuals just trying to function in society.
These are called "General Anti-Avoidance" rules. The UK calls theirs a "General Anti-Abuse" rule but it's the same idea, probably better branding. The consequence of not having them is that huge corporations just don't pay your taxes because hey, what do you mean you wanted us to pay taxes, if you provide any means by which I can avoid that surely I must be intended to avoid it, right ?
It's not a "nightmare" unless your goal is to avoid paying taxes or the rule was very incompetently drafted. If you want to spend $5M figuring out how to avoid paying $5M in taxes and then moan that it was expensive, remember to factor in the price of the minuscule violins other tax payers will be needing.
It's a nightmare because one prosecutor may think that building out infrastructure for a technology that really might not be worth the cost is a perfectly valid research expense and a different one may not. Similar to how one person might think that the social safety net is for someone who lost the ability to provide for themselves through no fault of their own, and another might think that the social safety net is for anyone who doesn't want to work. These things need to be written down clearly expressing the intent so that society can understand and make choices appropriately. Like, if the tax code said you can have a 401k account and put a reasonable amount in it per year, then some people might think they can dump $400,000 tax free per year into their 401k while another thinks $16,500 is a reasonable amount.
There is no "prosecutor" in a typical GAAR. The question isn't whether you're a crook, the question is whether your tax avoiding scheme works or it doesn't and if it doesn't then you have to pay the taxes you wanted to avoid.
Take the UK example since I live there, their GAAR uses a "Double Reasonableness" test. Jurors must be sure that no reasonable person could reasonably believe that whatever your avoidance scheme was has any purpose other than avoiding taxation.
Your examples are nowhere close to that line. Here's a (loose and simplified) description of a scheme which failed the test: To get a "Car Dealer" tax discount, have a third party company on your behalf repeatedly buy and sell the exact same car, multiple times per day.
Car dealers getting a tax discount as part of government policy makes sense. Maybe you're not that directly connected to the dealing but you provide the money or whatever, so you get the benefit, OK, I guess. But buying and selling the exact same car over and over again is clearly not a real car dealer is it? This is nonsense, you're doing it only to avoid taxation.
Which is why people write articles like this... to draw attention to these ambiguities and how much of a boon they are for businesses with lots of resources to navigate and exploit them.
I see the article as almost obsessively focused on the details and intricacies about how Meta is attempting to avoid taxes, what the timelines are, who's involved, etc. It seems written to be read like a thriller almost: to what lengths could this evil corporation go to further their schemes? There seems to be exactly 1 paragraph about when, why, and how the laws in question came to be:
> The tax break dates to the first year of the Reagan administration, when Japan...
It seems to me that there could be a lot more discussion and analysis on what led to the laws, who was involved, efforts since to amend them, etc.
For better or for worse, keeping someone's attention is a prerequisite to giving them information.
More generally, I'm not sure that an analysis of a particular set of laws, loopholes, amendments, etc is all that valuable for a general audience. The reality is there is an ~infinite number of these things. It's actually much more important to understand the intensity of effort and sophistication that goes into finding and exploiting them.
In the EU it's typical to keep to the spirit of the law, not necessarily to the letter. It makes it less game-able. If the tax break is for research and you use it for research and not "well, technically it could be considered research if you squint hard enough", you'll be fine.
"spirit and the letter (of the law)" is a common phrase in English. For the next part IANAL.
It appears in the US that generally the letter of the law matters more in legal proceedings than the spirit of what was written. Though there is sometimes debate (especially around the constitution) as to what the words meant at the time the law was written which give a little legal freeway to the spirit. From what I have seen though these cases generally deal more with rights/civil liberties than laws which affect corporations/tax codes/processes/etc. There is greater freedom to interpret the spirit of the law in criminal cases (e.g. jury nullification).
Henry Ford was also a notorious nazi sympathizer, maybe you can take those kind of statements with a grain of salt.
Serfdom was abolished in the russian empire in 1861, so feudalism is a still relatively recent phenomenon in human history; and giving more recent examples slavery was abolished in Mauritania only recently.
You can presume they are biased, then you have to prove it. You cannot assume all they say is biased, no debate is possible with that kind of assumptions.
Maybe you could give numbers because french nuclear industry is completely profitable. If you like numbers like me: there were more subsidies to wind and solar energy the last twenty years in germany than the price of the whole french nuclear program (300 billions) since its inception (250 billions since the 1974).
The reliability of french electricity benefits both France and Europe as a whole. I cannot say the same about what germany is trying to do.
Why then was EDF nationalized in 2023? A year after making an €18B loss? Why was EDF forced to buy the massively loss-making Areva/Framatome in 2017? How will Flamanville 3 - the latest reactor - at a cost of €24B to deliver 1.6GW ever be profitable, given it will need to earn €138 per MWh over 60 years just to break even? This is over 2.5 times the average wholesale price of the market it will be selling into and twice the €70/MWh state mandated nuclear electricity price cap.
It was nationalized to force it build new reactors despite demand not growing enough
The 138€ is under pessimistic assumptions. Min profitability limit on the other hand is 9ct/kwh. But nobody denies fla3 was a failure.
You didn't understand the electric cap in France. It's a cap on profits. If edf sells at certain thresholds above 70€ due to market, the state will take extra profit. It's sort of like double CFDs for renewables except edf has no minimum compensation
> It was nationalized to force it build new reactors despite demand not growing enough
It was nationalized because it had suffered record losses in the previous year and was struggling with a ballooning debt mountain of 65B euro. The French government didn’t need to nationalize it to control its strategic direction - it already owned 84% of it. That was the press release claim in order to present the bailout as “strategic”.
And the point was to address the gp’s claim that nuclear was profitable. Profitable enterprises don’t lose 18B a year or suffer financial instability due to a debt mountain on their balance sheets.
> You didn't understand the electric cap in France.
I don’t see how you drew that conclusion - the reactor needs to earn €138 per MWh (that’s the middle estimate not the worst case which is €180 per MWh). But the most it can earn is €70/MWh due to The cap? You’re just restating what I said. This reactor will be deeply unprofitable for its entire life.
Anything is cheaper when you don't count all the costs.
In January 2017 a parliamentary committee reported: "The cost of decommissioning is likely to be greater than the provisions," the technical feasibility is "not fully assured" and the dismantling work will take "presumably more time than expected."
> EdF responded that it "assumes full responsibility for the technical and financial aspects of dismantling its nuclear plants," and noted that it was currently decommissioning nine reactors, so had a good basis of experience. It also pointed out that its funds set aside for decommissioning were audited by the Ministry of the Environment, Energy and the Sea the previous month.
And, a little bit earlier, the article author's assesment:
> There are well-developed plans for dismantling these (which have been shut down since 1990 or before) and work is progressing.
There’s tons of costs associated with coal, oil, and natural gas extraction, processing, and use, which are neither priced into up front costs nor the price that customers pay for the product. If those were priced in, then fossil fuels would have to become more expensive. Those costs currently get diffused into various other areas and paid for by a wide net of payers, including both the customers and non-customers, and a big one is the government (taxpayer).
Except for the winter of 2022 when more than half of French reactors were not running, which was especially critical because of the Russian War against the Ukraine. Coal reactors had to be reactivated in Germany so lights didn't turn off in France.
Or summer when reactors have to be shut down because the rivers are too hot or running low.
So many reactors off was a special event of delayed maintenance, things are done so that does not usually happens.
And it's not true to say that Germany reactivated coal reactors for French lights.
Germany activated coal to reduce dependance on gas, and Germany exported energy to France because of the maintainances ; you know, the old correlation =/= causation.
That one occurence over 4 decades, I would say we can dare to call it pretty reliable
> Nuclear plants along the Danube river in Hungary and Romania were forced to cut output this week and could be shut down completely in the coming days due to record low water levels.
You know when rivers run not-low? In winter when we need to heat all those freezing homes. Crazy how that works. Yup, it's not ideal in a summer heat wave... but that's precisely when solar can shine.
We need both until we've solved storage. There's no need for more false dichotomies and FUD.
Spot on. We are automating what has never needed to be done anyway, bullshit jobs or mostly bullshit. Helpdesk, client hotline, analytics dashboards, reports ? What if we tried to make things work on first time and always so that there is no need for a helpdesk. If you produce something of clear value you don't need analytic dashboards or reports. I do not know if AI is the end of capitalism and bureaucracy or the final nail in the coffin for them to eat the world.
SAML is XML era legacy so mostly ugly but it's just the form of it. But all the security problems come from XMLDSIG which is just the worst signature scheme ever designed. So much complexity for so few to deliver. Just sign a bunch of bytes.
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