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At last,
the contents of Aardvark's "million-dollar ideas" notebook
are revealed for all to see!
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More Net novelties, web weirdness and cyber craziness in this week's Lighten
Up section:
Build Your Own Cow
This page lets you build your own customised cow to your exact specifications.
What more could you ever want?
Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers
Why do so many people look like this -- is it some kind of disease perhaps?
Alternative Three
What whacko wrote this? Seemingly designed as a joke/spoof, apparently some
people actually believed it and now there is a cult following. But hey,
If you saw/read/heard it on the Net it *must* be true... right?
A Taxing Problem
According to
this story
the government wants to start charging GST on imported services and electronically
downloaded software sourced from overseas.
The justification is that under the present situation, local companies are
disadvantaged by having to charge the tax, while direct imports are effectively
tax-free.
I can understand that -- sounds reasonable -- except...
What about someone like myself who runs a website that is hosted in the USA
and which does business solely outside NZ?
Am I going to have to pay GST on my web hosting charges? One would assume
so. However, that hosting fee is (for GST purposes) a legitimate expense
and therefore I can claim any GST back so suddenly I'm simply being asked
to do extra paperwork (at my own expense) for no gain to the taxman.
So much for the goal of simplifying the tax system and reducing compliance
costs eh?
More importantly -- just how are they going to police the levying and payment
of the $12.50 worth of GST that will be owed on that $100 software package
you download from a US website?
I wonder if this is just an other excuse to extend the powers of the proposed
Crimes Amendment Bill? Will we have the IRD snooping on all our online
transactions and comparing the amounts spent with individual declarations?
Or maybe it will be simpler than that. Perhaps the banks will simply be
ordered to add 12.5% GST to all credit card billing made by overseas
companies against an NZ-issued credit card? If so -- what about those non-IT
related charges? How about the deposit you make to secure your accommodation
on that tour of Europe you're taking next month? What about all those
charges you rack up on your card while you're actually on holiday -- using
your NZ issued credit card to buy goods and services that are not really
subject to GST at all.
That's simple they'll bill you the GST anyway and you'll be forced to apply
to the IRD for a refund of the GST that was slapped on those transactions.
It should only take a few months to get your money back -- but isn't it a
shame that you've had to lend the government part of your holiday savings
at the very time you need them the most eh?
Perhaps the changes only apply to those who are already registered for GST
purposes. If this is the case, will we see a growing trend for companies to
invite their employees to buy software with their personal credit cards and
compensate them by way of monthly (GST-free) bonuses?
But even that doesn't make sense -- since in almost every case, a business
registered for GST purposes will be able to claim back the GST component
of their input costs anyway -- so we're back to being lumbered with extra
paper-work for no apparent reason.
Have I missed something here or is this, like so much tax legislation,
just an extra burden being foisted onto the public to generate a piffling
amount of gain. The only winners are likely to be the bureaucrats and
the lawyers who get to prosecute the little old lady in Taihape who
let her grandson user her credit card details to purchase and download a new
game from the USA for his birthday but didn't file the necessary paperwork because
she didn't know she had to.
But what do YOU think?
Send me your comments.
More on XtraMSN
Wow... it was deja vu all over again at Xtra/MSN yesterday.
Those who were Net users back in the "good old days" when XTRA first launched
their incredibly perverted website that used a 135Kbyte graphic for the
front page come main menu. Remember -- these were the days when 28.8Kbps was
state of the art!
I had numerous emails from people yesterday bitching that the new XtraMSN site
was either down or loading like a stunned slug -- and some of these were
Xtra subscribers using Telecom's own JetStream ADSL service!
So why was this?
A traceroute and a few pings showed that it wasn't a bandwidth problem --
so I guess the servers were just running out of grunt. I wonder if they've
been replacing some of their Solaris boxes with Windows-based ones perhaps?
Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using
the RSS format. More details can be found
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