Corporate law is overwhelmingly state law. Every federally tax exempt entity is a state (or foreign) corporation or other kind of entity, and states (or foreign governments) impose rules on corporations registered in their borders.
Plus, many states levy their own corporate taxes. A nonprofit corporation needs to secure tax-exempt status from states as well as the federal government. This is a necessary implication of America's dual-sovereignty system.
this is correct. the main advantage of a VAT is incentive alignment. every intermediary producer must collect and remit VAT if they want to claim their VAT refunds for inputs. i.e., a seller of a good in Europe must collect VAT if they want to claim a VAT refund on whatever they paid for the good.
compare to American sales taxes, where sellers have no economic incentive to collect sales taxes beyond the probability of being caught and fined.
Primarily though, they must collect VAT because it's the law. In Germany, you can get an exception if you're tiny and have very low revenue.
If it was optional if you didn't want to claim expended VAT, quite a few companies would happily choose that, because you don't pay VAT on labor and that's the biggest cost in many industries. If you're primarily b2c, you could effectively lower your prices by a good chunk or get a healthy chunk of extra profit.
But you can't, because there's no choice, it's just the law.
In my country, segments more prone to “informal” sales (SMEs, cash transactions, limited incentive for paperwork), have reduced VAT (final sale has a reduced rate compared to many supplies), and the customer can get some of that VAT back as an income tax deduction if they demand to be invoiced.
The advantage of this, is that if you have to have accounting for sales, you'll probably have accounting too for labour, and you'll also pay income tax, social security, etc.
In my US state, vendors & service providers are quite open about "if you pay cash, I will not charge you the Gross Receipts Tax" (GRT is New Mexico's weird attempt at something vaguely like a cross between VAT and a sales tax).
How does Germany define low revenue for VAT purposes? In the UK, the threshold for compulsory VAT registration is currently £90,000 annual revenue, which I would say is quite large.
Max 100k € in the current year, max 25k € in the previous, so effectively you can do it indefinitely only if you remain below 25k. Should you ever cross 100k, you have to immediately switch to the regular scheme, collecting VAT (and being able to file any VAT you paid).
I don't know any numbers, but I only ever see it being used by sellers on Amazon.
Many businesses in the UK operate comfortably with revenue less than £90k. Sole traders mainly. But yes, once you employ staff it's likely you'll be looking at needing a higher revenue.
Sole traders working labour only may operate below this comfortably. But this is irrelevant to this thread about international trade in GOODS. Not many who are shipping goods and trying to make a decent income off a margin will fall under £90k. If you think you want to make £50k a year on a 25% margin, for instance, you will smash that threshold.
Fair. I wanted to compare the German and UK thresholds more generally (the German threshold seems very low to me even for labour-only sole traders). But I would agree with you that trade in goods across borders would very likely cross the UK threshold very quickly.
When you're driving the highway from the international airport at Keflavík to Reykjavík, the first big building you see is a massive Rio Tinto aluminum smelter: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ATHxAWRLKLMf8Gbh8
> We can see this in-action already. Places like California have effectively de-criminalized most/all drug use if you are part of the homeless population. Surprise again - there's more drug use within that community than ever before. It's difficult to walk through the down-town area without seeing overt drug use these-days.
Is this unique to CA? The street level suffering you see in CA cities is overwhelmingly related to fentanyl, an opioid. Infamously, the US is in the midst of the opioid crisis, with deaths continuing to rise unabated [1]. Places with harsher drug policing are also seeing rises in opioid deaths.
And while San Francisco is a top location for opioid deaths, the other top counties by death rates (Mendocino, Trinity, Alpine, Lake, Inyo, Humboldt, Nevada) are all very rural [2].
For what it's worth—the Library of Congress published a DMCA exemption for video games that require a use of a no-longer-available verification server.
I realize the headline is designed to be attention-grabbing, but "lie" is pretty strong given the warning's actual text.
Could the warning be better phrased? Almost certainly—it's a four-sentence digest, designed for a lay audience, of an incredibly complicated area of law (copyright fair use). But the warning itself is completely accurate: There are conditions where reproducing a copyrighted work (which otherwise infringe's the owner's exclusive right of reproduction) is acceptable. And "one of these specified conditions" (quoting from the warning) is for scholarship. It's not the only such condition!
To me, this feels like the author is making a mountain out of a molehill.
How does distracted driving explain increasing pedestrian death rates in America while death rates are flat or down [1] in other industrialized countries? Unless there's a reason why distracted driving particularly affects America, I don't think it can explain this trend.
There could be a number of reasons from average vehicle size to urban planning norms to pedestrian culture. Maybe we jaywalk more on more dangerous roads with larger vehicles with less visibility and our fat bodies have larger hit boxes.
I think the majority of the increased deaths are probably from the higher grills and weight -- instead of tumbling over the hood of a sedan, you get hit center mass by a truck or SUV which is far more damaging. That said, great point on jaywalking more, compared to when I was living in Germany or Estonia, we jaywalk far more (and engage in riskier activities in roadways like with scooters and ATVs) than those places.
I totally agree that it's not obvious that an ML model is a derivative work. the language of the Copyright Act uses "recast, transformed, or adapted" to describe derivative works, and a pile of model weights isn't clearly that, IMO. I think it's fair to say that inferences directly replicating the creative and expressive elements (because factual information isn't copyrightable!) of a copyrighted work infringe. but I don't think it's obvious that the model itself does.
> If one goes to their local library and scans all the books there to generate the models used to OCR text, does that make the OCR model and application derivative works of the books?
there is a court case [1] addressing an even more infringing use case: scanning and OCR'ing books to produce a searchable database. that case turned on fair use, however, and not whether the database was a derivative work.
Plus, many states levy their own corporate taxes. A nonprofit corporation needs to secure tax-exempt status from states as well as the federal government. This is a necessary implication of America's dual-sovereignty system.