To us, it’s an obscure shift of tax law. To the City, it’s the heist of the century

George Monbiot on a prospective change to the British corporate tax system.

At the moment tax law ensures that companies based here, with branches in other countries, don’t get taxed twice on the same money. They have to pay only the difference between our rate and that of the other country. If, for example, Dirty Oil plc pays 10% corporation tax on its profits in Oblivia, then shifts the money over here, it should pay a further 18% in the UK, to match our rate of 28%. But under the new proposals, companies will pay nothing at all in this country on money made by their foreign branches.

Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPub and XML on the Web

Dare Obasanjo nails a primary cause of a failure in the wider world to adopt your pet technology.

When I look at all three of these failures I see a common pattern which I’ll now be on the look out for when analyzing the suitability of technologies for my purposes. In each of these cases, the technology was designed for a specific niche with the assumption that the conditions that applied within that niche were general enough that the same technology could be used to solve a number of similar looking but very different problems.

I agree wholeheartedly with this paragraph from Fraser Speirs in How the iPad Wants to be Used:

The iPad is an intensely personal device. In its design intent it is, truly, much more like a “big iPhone” than a “small laptop”. The iPad isn’t something you pass around. It’s not really designed to be a “resource” that many people take advantage of. It’s designed to be owned, configured to your taste, invested in and curated.

“We need to keep offering these wages to keep the best people.”

So we are repeatedly told by the banks, including those which we, as tax payers, own to some extent. We’ll come back to this.

In the early days of the financial crisis, way back in the summer of 2007 when the first tremors were starting to be felt, we were confidently told by many bankers and economists that we were hitting a blip, a bump in the road which clearly stretched indefinitely on into the sunshine. Including many bankers at the world’s “safest” banks.

How and why did Amazon get into the cloud computing business?

An answer from Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, on the story that Amazon Web Services was created to use Amazon.com’s spare capacity during quiet periods.

The excess capacity story is a myth. It was never a matter of selling excess capacity, actually within 2 months after launch AWS would have already burned through the excess Amazon.com capacity. Amazon Web Services was always considered a business by itself, with the expectation that it could even grow as big as the Amazon.com retail operation.