by
Owen Jones
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Nonetheless, Ernst & Young's Steve Varley is insistent that tax avoidance is effectively a necessity: that companies are practically compelled to engage in the practice by law. Directors of companies have a 'fiduciary legal responsibility' to have a strategy that increases the 'financial position' of their businesses, he says. 'Then it starts to get blurred, nowadays, doesn't it? Because you've got the whole thing about what's moral, what's fair, what's equitable in society. I think it's really difficult to respond to. How do you really work what's a moral and fair tax? You have a fiduciary responsibility as a company director to make sure you do the right thing for the company and there's nothing in company law about doing the right thing for society.'
he goes on to say that the Companies Act 2006 does actually compel directors to care about local communities etc but this mindset is very widespread (afaik) and thus worth noting
But for Simon Walker, Directory General of the Institute of Directors [...] He advocates rolling back all remaining workers' protection laws, because he does not believe it is possible to 'regulate for bad bosses'. His view is that the market will simply decide. 'I think that if a company is known to be a rotten employer, it will get a reputation for that, and people will be much less keen to work there,' he argues. Walker apparently labours under the illusion that millions of workers are spoilt for choice about where they can work, or are able to judge the relative benevolence of employers, and to make a choice about their place of work based on such knowledge. It is a fantastical view that says much more about how insulated are the lives of those at the top rather than the reality of the situation for the vast majority of working Britons.
[...] 'I think the City is a convenient whipping boy, because everybody loves having a scapegoat,' he says. 'Everybody was more than happy to get a zero per cent interest rate on their credit card, everybody's happy to spend, consume, and spend money that ultimately they don't have.' In truth, workers who had been experiencing real-term falls in their living standards long before the crash had been forced to top up their increasingly meagre income with cheap credit.
if they were happy, it's prob cus they didn't realise the consequences? cus economics (as in, real, non-delusional economics) is something that most people aren't taught? kids are happy to eat candy all the time too, but ...
need to analyse this train of thought a little more cus it's prob pretty common
[...] on many issues, UKIP voters are more radical than then British public as a whole. One YouGov poll found that 78 per cent of UKIP voters supported public ownership of energy companies (compared to 68 per cent of all voters); 73 per cent wanted the railways renationalized (as against 66 per cent); 50 per cent advocated rent controls (the wider figure was 45 per cent); and an astounding 40 per cent believed in price controls on food and groceries, compared to 35 per cent of all Britons.
whoa
“Shall we?” he said, and guided Delaney toward a playground, designed by Yayoi Kusama and paid for by the Every. Adults welcome! a sign said, and then, below and in parentheses: If accompanied by a child. Delaney glanced at the small print, which emphasized the importance of Play (always capitalized) in the creative life of adults.
Capital-P Play was last year’s management theory, following multitasking, singletasking, grit, learning-from-failure, napping, cardioworking, saying no, saying yes, the wisdom of the crowd > trusting one’s gut, trusting one’s gut > the wisdom of the crowd, Viking management theory, Commissioner Gordon workflow theory, X-teams, B-teams, embracing simplicity, pursuing complexity, seeking zemblanity, creativity through radical individualism, creativity through groupthink, creativity through the rejection of groupthink, organizational mindfulness, organizational blindness, microwork, macrosloth, fear-based camaraderie, love-based terror, working while standing, working while ambulatory, learning while sleeping, and, most recently, limes.
ok, this is kind of funny
“I believe they’re in the Romantic Period,” he said, waving a hand in the general direction of the campus. Somewhere in there, Vijay and Martin were installed. She liked them a great deal, and assumed they were now miserable, as were every team of founders-who’d-sold-out, and would be for the five years they’d agreed to stay while vesting, after which they would peel off and start family foundations.
But the billion-dollar acquisitions kept the world of tech alive and dreaming, and the smartest entrepreneurs were those who recognized that preparing oneself for Every acquisition was far easier, and far more logical, than either staying private and trying to make a profit—Sisyphean madness—or going the treacherous and unpredictable route of an IPO.
fair
Wes grinned. His eyes bulged with inspiration. “We can!” he said. “I’ll send a strongly worded letter. And you can stand beyond the gates with a picket. Maybe one of us writes a novel.”
rude
The day of this announcement, this call for surveillance in the woods, Delaney was at her station, halfway up Mt. Lassen, an expired volcano in northeast California. It was then that Delaney was re-radicalized. She stared down at the alpine lakes strewn around the base of the mountain, and she chose war. She pictured a conflagration, a revolution, a burning-down. What these companies had done was nothing less than radical speciation. In a few short decades they’d transformed proud and free animals—humans—and made them into endlessly acquiescent dots on screens. Citizens in cities had given up their liberties early in the twenty-first century, but the natural world had remained wild, and people could stay hidden, could move freely. But the last vestige of freedom—the ability to move through the natural world unobserved—fell away on a Friday, and no one noticed.
come on don't preach at me
As she walked home, Delaney fumed. This was the Every’s doing—another public space brought within their field of surveillance. She was angry, too, that she knew nothing about this new restriction. But how could she have? There was no longer local news. Starved of advertising and attacked as inherently exploitive and predatory—people no longer trusted filters, curators, observers and intermediaries—journalism had died quietly and alone.
ok this analysis seems sus to me
Soon many hundreds of people who had been living in tents and shanties under nearby highways found the company’s outer barrier far safer and cleaner and warmer. In a few weeks there were hundreds of humans living in tents in a ragged ring between the Bay’s rough and rising sea and the Every campus, providing the starkest reminder of what happens when a society has a threadbare safety net and no plan for those who fall through it—and, more pointedly, what happens when the largest companies in the state and the nation and world somehow find ways to avoid paying taxes.