Every year when April 15 rolls around I find myself wondering if this is going to be the time when I finally get fed up and renounce my US citizenship.
I'm a natural-born US citizen and a naturalized EU citizen. I haven't set foot in the States in over a decade. I receive nothing from the US government[1] and I cost the US government nothing[2]. My only source of income is my salaried job. The very idea that I should be subject to taxation by the US isn't just ludicrous but downright offensive.
Don't get me wrong: I am by no means an anti-taxation libertarian. I'm a leftie pinko who loves the high-taxation welfare state and pays into it uncomplainingly. But there is - or should be - an implicit bargain in all taxation: the citizen pays something and the citizen gets something in return. For an expat like myself this bargain doesn't pertain.
Now, my circumstances are such that I don't actually pay any US taxes. This is the main reason why I haven't yet gotten fed up and renounced my US citizenship. But I still have to spend at least a full day every spring collecting paperwork and putting together pointless tax returns, and I need to pay for an expensive US tax accountant if I want some reassurance that I'm not unintentionally violating any of the expatriate tax and disclosure laws. (Not that that's any guarantee. A lot of overseas tax accounts aren't even fully up-to-date on the constantly changing regularions. And the penalties for missing or messing up an FBAR are downright terrifying.)
If my financial affairs were any more complicated I would end up having to pay US taxes. For example, if I bought a house and then sold it for a profit, the IRS would hit me with an absolutely unjustifiable capital gains tax.
Now the US is imposing such intrusive reporting requirements on foreign banks that many of them are starting to refuse to do business with US citizens - expatriates are starting to find it difficult to even open a bank overseas.
And spare a thought for my daughter, who will end up in the same situation a035bb942 described above: she's a US citizen through no fault of her own. She might well spend her entire life in Europe, never setting foot in the United States, but if she doesn't file an FBAR every year of her adult life Uncle Sam may come after her with all guns blazing.
Faced with such insanity, renunciation is a perfectly rational way out. What am I really getting in return for this heavy and unwarranted US intrusion into my life?
Of course, the US gets you coming and going: renouncing costs $450. They might also hit you with an exit tax before they let you go.
[1] There's always somebody who wants to argue this point: look at all the wonderful intangible benefits I get from being under the protection of the world's greatest power! Bollocks. Being American doesn't protect me from anything; if anything it exposes me to greatly increased danger in many parts of the world.
[2] Someone will say that my very existence as a US citizen imposes a certain administrative cost on the US government. Again, bollocks. I impose an administrative cost on the IRS/Treasury only because they require me to. I pay for my decennial passport renewal. This is the full extent of my interactions with the US government.
This is absolutely untrue. The IRS treats citizens and green card holders ("resident aliens") exactly alike for tax purposes. Every single piece of relevant IRS documentation refers to "U.S. citizens and resident aliens abroad" - see, for example: http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/U.S.-...
This behavior depends on a user preference, "Save documents to SkyDrive by default". I don't remember whether this is enabled by default. (I've since overwritten my Windows 8.1 installation.)
I bicycled over a large bump, my Lumia 920 jumped out of my shirt pocket and fell onto asphalt from a height of about four feet at a speed of about 25 mph. It bounced a few times and then slid several feet. The damage: a few dented corners and a single light 3mm scratch on the glass. No complaints about build quality here.
Why is .co.uk any more meaningless than .com? They're both arbitrary character strings. If anything, .com is less meaningful than .co.uk: .co.uk conveys a larger quantum of meaning ("British company") than does .com ("company").
And what's wrong with wasting letters? Expecting the entire world to exist under .com is just as stupid as AOL expecting the entire world to exist within a 16-character username space.
Thinking that you must pay "for stupid extra domain names to stop someone else impersonating you", well, that's stupid too - just as stupid as saying you have to maintain your email address on every single provider to stop someone else impersonating you. Names aren't unique. The world needs to deal with it.
You could say that the US has squatted on two TLDs since the beginning (.gov and .mil) and .edu was later added to that list, but all of the other TLDs have always been open for registration anywhere in the world.
You're not exactly nailing the history there yourself. The very first specification of TLDs listed five of what we now call gTLDs (.com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .org) and also stipulated that every two-letter ISO country code would also be a TLD. ccTLDs have been around from the very beginning of the DNS.
FastMail is a fantastic IMAP email service and a very good webmail service, but it's a very poor mobile email service - for access from smartphones and tablets (including contacts and calendar syncing) it falls woefully short.
Not the same as every other cloud provider. Not every other cloud provider makes it a point of pride to deliberately make it quite impossible to ever reach any sort of customer service representative.
Yes. It is better. Absolutely. Unquestionably. But if you can't see that creating an unwanted, unused piece of stuff is obviously, necessarily worse than not wasting the raw materials and human time and effort, I'm not sure any amount of discussion will help.
It is not vanity for me to hope that my daughter might be able to enjoy a world at least as good as the one I did (although it is, alas, vain). When I die I won't be rewarded - or punished - for anything I have ever done. But she might. Not to care about the effect our actions will have on other people is the very definition of selfishness. And I'm glad that I don't live in a world where the only alternative to selfishness is vanity.
The evidence against cereals (and most especially wheat) seems in general to be much more widely accepted than that against legumes; take that as you will.
(Or to put it another way: "don't eat wheat" features in a lot more of the newfangled low-carbohydrate diets than "don't eat beans".)
As depicted in the review, the argument boils down to "a lot can change in 10,000 years". I'm happy to agree that this is true, but it doesn't mean that a lot must change in 10,000 years.
The fact that evolution can move quickly does not indicate that it always will. Nothing in this article refutes the proposition that we may be evolutionarily maladapted to the typical modern western diet dominated by highly refined sugars and gluten grains.
Is paleo maybe a somewhat precious and slightly extreme reaction? Maybe. But that doesn't invalidate the core insight: that we're filling our pieholes with vast amounts of crap our bodies aren't optimized for. And given that the metabolic syndrome of disorders thought to be associated with this diet tends to develop later in life, often after the prime reproductive years, it's perfectly plausible that an evolutionary adaptation to this diet might be particularly slow to develop.
Don't be absurd. Of course it's different than having Google as default search engine.
The provision of a default search engine is an absolute requirement for providing "search the Internet" functionality. If a default engine has to be provided, it's not so offensive for Canonical to score some cash by providing the option that practically all of their users would choose anyway.
The provision of a default shopping engine is not a requirement for providing "search my computer" functionality. They're taking one thing - a tool for managing my own data, on my own computer - and turning it into something else: a way for a multinational retail behemoth to constantly exhort me to buy things.
Weariness with endless commercial bombardment is a significant reason why I showed Apple the door and started using Ubuntu in the first place. Apparently, I didn't run far enough.
I'm quite receptive to arguments about why San Francisco is horrible - after ten years in the place, naturally I like to see my decision to leave validated - but this is really a lot more about the author than it is the city.
Actually, you can. You can change the country of your iTunes account at will (), provided you have valid billing details for the 'new' country. This is one of the few good things I have to say about Apple's account management; the competition generally don't allow changing country at all (I'm looking at you, Microsoft).
I used to do this all the time, before I got completely fed up with Apple and decided to have nothing more to do with them. I purchased music from the US, UK and German iTunes stores, all on the same account. (I lead, perhaps, a somewhat more international life than many.) It works rather less well in the brave new iCloud world, as the (relatively) new 'redownload previously purchased content' functionality will only show you content from the country you're currently set to.
() Or rather you could, because there's now a honking great caveat: you cannot change country if you have an active iTunes Match subscription.
I'm a natural-born US citizen and a naturalized EU citizen. I haven't set foot in the States in over a decade. I receive nothing from the US government[1] and I cost the US government nothing[2]. My only source of income is my salaried job. The very idea that I should be subject to taxation by the US isn't just ludicrous but downright offensive.
Don't get me wrong: I am by no means an anti-taxation libertarian. I'm a leftie pinko who loves the high-taxation welfare state and pays into it uncomplainingly. But there is - or should be - an implicit bargain in all taxation: the citizen pays something and the citizen gets something in return. For an expat like myself this bargain doesn't pertain.
Now, my circumstances are such that I don't actually pay any US taxes. This is the main reason why I haven't yet gotten fed up and renounced my US citizenship. But I still have to spend at least a full day every spring collecting paperwork and putting together pointless tax returns, and I need to pay for an expensive US tax accountant if I want some reassurance that I'm not unintentionally violating any of the expatriate tax and disclosure laws. (Not that that's any guarantee. A lot of overseas tax accounts aren't even fully up-to-date on the constantly changing regularions. And the penalties for missing or messing up an FBAR are downright terrifying.)
If my financial affairs were any more complicated I would end up having to pay US taxes. For example, if I bought a house and then sold it for a profit, the IRS would hit me with an absolutely unjustifiable capital gains tax.
Now the US is imposing such intrusive reporting requirements on foreign banks that many of them are starting to refuse to do business with US citizens - expatriates are starting to find it difficult to even open a bank overseas.
And spare a thought for my daughter, who will end up in the same situation a035bb942 described above: she's a US citizen through no fault of her own. She might well spend her entire life in Europe, never setting foot in the United States, but if she doesn't file an FBAR every year of her adult life Uncle Sam may come after her with all guns blazing.
Faced with such insanity, renunciation is a perfectly rational way out. What am I really getting in return for this heavy and unwarranted US intrusion into my life?
Of course, the US gets you coming and going: renouncing costs $450. They might also hit you with an exit tax before they let you go.
[1] There's always somebody who wants to argue this point: look at all the wonderful intangible benefits I get from being under the protection of the world's greatest power! Bollocks. Being American doesn't protect me from anything; if anything it exposes me to greatly increased danger in many parts of the world.
[2] Someone will say that my very existence as a US citizen imposes a certain administrative cost on the US government. Again, bollocks. I impose an administrative cost on the IRS/Treasury only because they require me to. I pay for my decennial passport renewal. This is the full extent of my interactions with the US government.