As you point out, someone needs to do the boring stuff. But now connect boring stuff with impacting other groups. The tax department needs to collect data that is of no use to the business, but required by the IRS. Someone in a different department needs to allocate resources to generate that data. Who manages that resource allocation?

I listen to music while I am browsing. Any ad executive that thinks he/she/it has the right to start their ad and automatically start playing audio, interfering with something else I am listening to, is the equivalent of home invasion. That is the fastest way to get me to block you and I will have no sympathy whatsoever.

For the people who complain about the gray line between the two existing categories - creating a third will not solve that problem. Then you just get two gray lines between three categories. This is sometimes referred to as the conservation of ambiguity.

Current cite demonstrating US having one of the lowest effective rates?

BTW, your definitions of effective rate and statutory rate are flat out wrong. Effective rate is the tax paid and accrued on net income on a financial accounting basis. The statutory rate is the rate of tax paid on net income on a tax accounting basis. The fact that there is a difference between the two is an indictment of how the tax system is written. It has nothing to do with having zero deductions.

You do realize that Denmark and The Netherlands are different countries, don't you?

The two whitespaces in the beginning of this line are not like the other. Get your tabs out of my spaces.

Nope. Some of us old people still use lisp. Quicklisp.org solved the library problem and stockpiling parentheses is cheap - they stack nicely. We do, however, have a not-invented here syndrome problem which may never go away. Google bought ITA Software in 2011 for just under $1 billion and ITA's main product is largely driven by lisp. So still around, just not talked about much.

Let me know when I can substitute postgresql instead of mysql.

I remember Gosling pushing to get people to move to NetBeans in 2008 (surprisingly a product created by his company, Sun). I tried it. Didn't like it. It felt like it wanted to be a gui rather than an editor. So I went back to happily using Emacs. So, serious question from an old guy and lisp programmer - what do you suggest as a replacement and why?

In the United States, real property refers to land and anything permanently affixed to the land - i.e. house, but not a trailer on wheels. The fun part gets into whether things like partitions or furniture screwed into the wall constitutes "permanently affixed". I've seen arguments over whether ceiling lamps were part of the real property or were detachable.

OK. Reverse engineering a bit and filling in gaps in the media reporting, here is my educated analysis. If you, as a UK consumer, buy a book from amazon.co.uk, you are actually hitting servers in Luxembourg and buying the book from a Luxembourg company. Letâ(TM)s call it Amazon Lux. Current EU VAT rules mean that if you are downloading a e-book, Amazon Lux only charges the Luxembourg VAT rates on the sale and hands that VAT over to the Luxembourg government. (This rule is expected to change in two years.) If you are buying a dead tree version, then Amazon Lux has to charge UK VAT rates on the sale and hands that VAT over to the UK government.

There is a separate Amazon subsidiary in the UK, which operates a warehouse and shipping operation. Letâ(TM)s call it Amazon UK. Amazon Lux pays Amazon UK to operate the warehouse and perform the shipping. Typically this is done on a cost-plus basis, so Amazon UK is probably recovering its costs and getting a profit margin of 5-10%. Amazon UK will be paying UK income taxes on this small profit margin.

The tax treaty between the UK and Luxembourg states that if the only thing a Luxembourg company has in the UK is an agent that distributes stuff or stores stuff in a warehouse, then the UK government wonâ(TM)t treat that Luxembourg company as âoedoing business in the UKâ. Amazon Lux can take this position because they claim that the actual âoesaleâ event happened at the servers in Luxembourg when you made the final click on Amazon Luxâ(TM)s website. If this position is valid, then any profit on the sale above and beyond the cost-plus margin at Amazon UK is only taxable in Luxembourg. (And remember that the cost-plus margin is taxed at Amazon UK, not Amazon Lux â" the legal entity that actually entered into the transaction with the consumer.)

The complicating historical question is whether Amazon could move its historical business operation out of the UK to Luxembourg without paying an exit tax. EU law allows free movement of business and capital, but the issue of whether you can bail out of a country to a lower taxed country without any tax consequences is a bit of a muddle right now.

My wife's favorite spam was titled: "Meet men with bigger breasts". She looks at me, bursts out laughing, and says "why would I want to meet men with big breasts?"

The company runs on (a) email and (b) webex conference calls. The conference calls easily suck up 3 hours a day.

Swiss three prong plug that doesn't look clunky.

See http://www.interpower.com/ic/images/plugs-and-sockets-poster.pdf

Office is big enough to have a U shaped modular desk that doesn't take the entire room.
__D______
ooooooo
ooxxxxM
oooooAx
xxxxxxx

Door is D, o is open space, x is modular desk, M is where I put the monitors and keyboard. A is where I sit. The grue is not shown.
IAAL. Not everything should be visible to whoever is walking in.