Interesting Links for 19-3-2011

[andrewducker]

• .xxx given final approval by Icann. I'm curious as to how this plays out, and worried that lots of content might get forced there...
  (tags: sex internet .xxx)
• On the ethics of retouching photos - a discussion from _1900_
  (tags: photography photoshop retouching bodyimage history)
• Amazing Victorian dress made from 1,000 beetle wings
  (tags: costumes clothing victorian)
• God's Wife Edited Out of the Bible.
  (tags: history religion judaism)
• Human gender roles influence research on animals
  (tags: bias gender psychology animals)
• The question the Lib Dems need to answer before the polls will rise
  (tags: libdem polls politics uk)
• When people can see teenager's music habits, they change them to avoid embarassment.
  (tags: music sociology social)
• Osborne's secret plan to raise tax – and scrap national insurance. Anyone knowing much about tax care to comment?
  (tags: insurance tax uk)
• Clegg's coup over the Conservatives on human rights.
  (tags: humanrights europe NickClegg LibDem conservatives government)
• Cheat codes discovered for priceless artworks (a funny response to "Are games art?")
  (tags: art computer_games)
• US e-book sales double as dead tree demand dips - 3.9% to 8.7% in a year.
  (tags: books ebooks usa)

Comments

[ladysisyphus.livejournal.com]

Yargh, that bit about God's girlfriend is so oversimplified, especially the title. I mean, I recognize that this is something that has to be boiled down to simpler terms so it's a Discovery.com article and not a four-hour lecture or a 200-page book.

I mean, the basic idea is correct: that the YHWH figure, from time to time, had a female counterpart! Yeah, that's not a shocking thing so much as pretty standard fare for Hebrew Bible scholarship these days.

But it's not like HOLY CRAP, GUYS, WE ONCE HAD A VERSION OF THE BIBLE WHERE GOD HAD A WIFE AND THEN SOME DICKHEADS GOT OUT THE RED PEN (for heaven's sake, she wasn't even remotely completely 'edited out' of the Bible, read Proverbs 8 and Judges 4-5). It's more that those facets of the tradition just didn't produce texts, and the primary evidence you get is when guys like Jeremiah are just going off on idolatry and hating on all the Asherah poles. But eventually Israel itself becomes God's (unfaithful) consort, in light of all the covenental imagery, and really, there's not room for two ladies in this relationship.

...This brought to you by my having just woken up, which is the ideal state for pounding incoherently on the keyboard, I assure you. I probably got something wrong, and I apologize blearily in advance.

[andrewducker]

No need to apologise - I rely on comments like this to keep me reasonably straight :->

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Disclaimer: I may be an accountant, but I'm an auditor, not a tax accountant.

There's surely a lot to be said for streamlining the collection of income taxes (by which I mean Income Tax and National Insurance). Employers pay National Insurance as well as employees, but they don't pay Income Tax, so moving the tax take to Income Tax would make employers more profitable, which in turn would raise the take from Corporation Tax, which profitable companies pay on their taxable profits, and of course make it more attractive for companies to operate in the UK. The other big redistribution would be from people who don't work but have incomes (i.e. Income Tax payers who aren't NI payers) to people who do work (i.e. NI payers).

[andrewducker]

That's assuming they don't just take Employer's NI and make it Employer's Income Tax instead :->

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

> people who don't work but have incomes

Oh yeah, that's a point. It would screw over everyone who's retired and on a pension.

From my current point of view as someone who has a job, streamlining it into one big tax would be simpler. Especially as I can never remember how much NI is, and it's totally stupidly named (Class 2? Class 4? WTF!) and so I only ever have a vague idea of what portion of freelance pay is my actual take-home pay.

[matgb]

Scrapping NI would be a bloody good net good if it's to happen.

Amongst other things, coalition agreement says tax threshold should rise to £10K, but doesn't mention NI threshold, which is already lower. So scrapping NI will help everyone, especially the lowest paid.

It used to be Lib Dem party policy, but was sidelined for the simple "it's horribly complicated and really difficult" reason, it remains a longer term aspiration, thus if this can happen, it'll be a good thing.

NI was introduced for damn fine reasons, but it's effectively irrelevent now and is just a different form of tax. But one that creates lots of extra work for employers, more confusion, and substantially increases the costs of employing people at the margins.

Making it cheaper and much easier to employ people, especially at the lowest pay scales, will do a lot more to help the unemployed and the general poor than many many other things that could be done.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Agreed on all counts, albeit with an economist's 'ceteris paribus' (everything else being equal) reservation.

Tax and NI

[anef.livejournal.com]

I think most people working in tax would welcome the change. It would be a huge simplification and make the system much more transparent. There are at the moment a number of rules about what income is taken into account which are different for tax and NI - this is just stupid and should change. For instance, Give As You Earn is only deductible for tax, not for NI.

The big proviso, however, is what happens to pensioners. They don't pay NIC so unless something is done specifically for them they would be facing a really big tax hike. Rich people living on investment income would also be hit, but presumably we don't care about them!

Re: Tax and NI

[andrewducker]

Yeah - pensions was one thing I thought of. Presumably they'd have to build something in there in order to not have a lot of very unhappy 70-year-olds (which, I believe, make up a lot of the Conservative core vote).