Portugal Is Considering a "Terabyte Tax" 353
An anonymous reader writes "As a proposal to avoid becoming the 'next Greece', a Portuguese opposition party has proposed a tax on storage. The party claims that the tax will not effect the average citizen and is mostly levied at business users, but internal storage on mobile phones means a 64GB iPhone could be €32 more expensive. From the article: 'The proposal would have consumers paying an extra €0.2 per gigabyte in tax, almost €21 extra per terabyte of data on hard drives. Devices with storage capacities in excess of 1TB would pay an aggravated tax of 2.5 cents per GB. That means a 2TB device will in fact pile on €51.2 in taxes alone (2.5 cents times 2048GB). External drives or “multimedia drives” as the proposed bill calls them, in capacities greater than 1TB, can be taxed to the tune of 5 cents per gigabyte, so in theory, a 2TB drive would cost an additional €103.2 per unit (5 cents times 2048GB)."
Killing off storage? (Score:3)
Outdated (Score:5, Insightful)
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. So yes you are correct. "That FA" may be wrong or old; but it isn't dead - Got to keep the fight going.
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"Draft law" is only one dropped letter away from "daft law".
Re:Outdated (Score:5, Funny)
...discarted like 2 moths ago.
So into the flame it went?
Re:Outdated (Score:4, Funny)
By Renee, attracted to a candle flame.
Re:Outdated (Score:4, Informative)
It was not completely discarded, it was canceled after all the criticism [google.pt], but they already said they're revising the proposal and will present it again.
2 moths ago (Score:2)
Do you have a war on moths in Portugal? It may be more effective than a war on caterpillers
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Indeed. Still, coming from a Portuguese itself, this is the most stupid idea ever! I got a better idea, why don't they reduce the parliament size to the minimum required by law and reduce their own wages to a sane value?
Did my Portuguese friends knew that the government servers that used to run Linux were just migrated to Microsoft DURING A RECESSIVE CRISIS?? It was for that reason that their web sites went down for several days:
http://exameinformatica.sapo.pt/noticias/internet/2012/04/04/sistema-de-redunda [exameinformatica.sapo.pt]
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As a Portuguese citizen, I'm not.
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I'm just saying I'm not loving watching the events. Even if this is the less worse option, it'll still be way too painful for me to enjoy it.
Re:Regardless (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. Pretty much the entire western world has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. Yet the politicians and policy makers consistently get it backwards.
It's the kind of magical thinking that caused Kagan to say "It's just a pile of federal money", apparently not realizing that it all comes from taxes on you.
Re:Regardless (Score:5, Interesting)
Not sure if you're trolling or just clueless about money. But I'll bite. Oddly enough you're wrong about both sides, so at least you don't have an agenda (that I can see).
All money value is theoretical, which what bugs me most about Ron Paul and the neo-goldbugs. Even gold has no value other than what we give it. We had to pick something of value, and gold just matched the characteristics best scarce but not too scarce, easily workable by ancients (smelts in the hundreds, not thousands of degrees), doesn't oxidize, etc.
BTW: Fractional Reserve banking was not created by bankers or the Left or the Right, but by goldsmiths in Britain who realized that when they started to create these notes that drew on gold deposits, they could create more than the deposits on hand. As long as things were stable and a small subset of people ever asked for their gold at any given time (we'd call this a bank run today).
Ownership of money is not limited - it can be created or destroyed as needed. Witness what the Fed had done during the Great Recession, creating dollars out of thin air. Why do they have value? Because we think they do.
The fruits of labor? The right is more about investment and solidity of value than worrying about labor. They worry more about capital markets, which would be hurt if inflation is high.
Governments tolerate light inflation for a few reasons. Mostly because it changes people's timelines for investment to the present not the future. I'll buy something now if i know it will be more expensive tomorrow.
Heavy inflation discourages investment - if I know the money i will get for this product 3 months in the future is less than the value of the investment now, I will not make that investment.
Deflation is even worse, it sets up a vicious cycle of no investment and layoffs. That's why we tolerate low inflation rather than zero inflation - don't want to be even close to dipping into deflation.
Please, go listen to old episodes of Planet Money, they're very informative.
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Then please enlighten us as to how the Left views money.
Re:Regardless (Score:4, Insightful)
but it is much easier to fix the structural flaws in a growing economy vice an economy in an austerity death spiral.
One of the structural flaws being that there's not enough political will to address them until the economy falls into the above trap. As I see it, repeatedly and routinely getting into the above situation is worse than a rare bout of "austerity death spiral" which is combined with credible structural reform.
Re:Regardless (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. That is a spending problem. No one planned for the likelihood that revenues might decrease and that we could have a "lean year". This is a basic fundemental problem that humans have been dealing with since the beginning of civilization.
You save up for a rainy day.
Yes. Having no rainy day fund is a spending problem.
Maths (Score:5, Insightful)
Doubling the price of a 2Tb external drive? You're going to have to pirate a *shitload* of stuff to make up for that.
Re:Maths (Score:5, Funny)
It's Europe, so it will have to be a Metric Shitload, which is itself different from the Imperial Shitload, which is 1.125 American Shitloads
--
BMO
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So this means Brits and Eurozoners are more full of shit than Americans? I wouldn't have thought that even possible. They must have better compression algorithms over there.
Re:Maths (Score:5, Funny)
Shit compression algorithms work only once, at the factory where it is forced into bags by magical and undocumented processes that happen at the quantum level. The factory is owned and operated by entities outside our Universe who have refused repeated inquiries about this process.
Shit is incompressible once out of the bag. You can never put it back in, hence one definition of a blivet which is "10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound bag" equating to a 2:1 compression ratio at the factory.
People have tried to put shit back in the bag once it has been let out. Einstein, and Bose thought they got close to a theoretical compression, which they called a Bose-Einstein-Shit condensate, but they failed to take into account dark energy, which is an opposing force that tends to spread shit everywhere.
When Edwin Hubble discovered the expanding universe through red shifts, he exclaimed "Holy Shit!" and "What is this shit?" not knowing at the time that shit is the actual source of the dark energy speeding the expansion.
Minkowski described "shit cones" describing the causality of shit.
Stephen Hawking, in his famous paper proved through Feynman-Shit diagrams that black holes evaporate because they "lose their shit."
At the macro level, sometimes this is also measured in worm cans. Worms eat shit, which is probably why they too are incompressible once out of the can.
--
BMO
Don't be silly. (Score:2)
It's a shibiload.
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Sounds like a challenge to me...
1tB != 1TB (Score:3, Insightful)
Am I the only one that thinks that people might finally complain that they're paying tax on the extra 24 MB in every GB without getting them?
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You assume people can do the math? They're overtaxed already when trying to figure out how they're screwed over with those "20% rebates" that rarely border the 15%.
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That's not the problem. The problem is that you consider that kind of bullshit is acceptable. Here in the old continent when you say I'm selling this for 500€ it means that you actually have to sell it for 500€. Not for 600€+taxes+mandatory tip minus coupon-filling bonus for limited number of people who fill some bscure criteria. You'd get sued for that, it's considered fraud.
This proposal was rejected. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This proposal was rejected. (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, seriously? What right do YOU have to come here and destroy the rants with facts? This article is the perfect fear and trolling opportunity and here you are, ruining it with facts.
Shame! I said SHAME! on you!
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I have no idea where you're from, but in America, ALL of our parties would be to the left of theirs. Even the Christian right is... SANE and defends the standard doctrine of european social safeguards :)
They can pass all the laws they want. We don't have the means or the will to enforce them. We're a narrow strip of shore, back when we actually had borders, before joining the EU, contraband was the norm.
Half of Portugal can get to Spain in less than an hour.
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Yes. But don't forget those who pay negative taxes, a.k.a. receiving handouts from the social welfare system. They do pay many indirect taxes like sales tax, but that is more than compensated for by their tax-subsidized income. Sure, it's not huge amounts of money we're talking about when seen on an individual basis, but on a national scale, depending on the size of the country and economy, that's many billio
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the people in charge of a set of rights management associations, which happen to be near bankruptcy due to gross mismanagement.
And one wonders how, considering how they steal from the rights holders by failing to contact them repeatedly when they're required to. Because, of course, they get the money first from the companies and then they are supposed to distribute it through the authors, so they have every incentive to "forget" the last part.
exponential (Score:5, Insightful)
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Way to kill the electronics retail business (Score:4, Insightful)
As I understand EU free-trade rules, as long as the appropriate taxes are paid in the country where goods are bought (inside the EU), the government cannot then levy additional taxes when imported, either directly (in the boot of a car) or when shipped.
So this just seems a great proposal to kill all domestic sales of electronic goods with drives in - iPads, smartphones, photocopiers, laptops - and relocate them to Spain instead. I'm sure the Spanish government wouldn't mind, but it doesn't like it's going to do much to help Portugese debt.
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This, combined with the fact that Britain has 0% VAT on books, means you should order your books from small, British internet stores. Amazon.co.uk is no good, as they will be over the limit for most countries.
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Yeah, but your VAT/IVA is only 19%. When it gets to 23% like here in Portugal buying from abroad starts to make a lot of sense.
Old & Inaccurate (Score:5, Informative)
It was not a proposal to avoid becoming 'the next Greece'. It was a proposal to "help" artists.
In reality it was just another levy (we have several) to benefit some corrupt goons on a local "rights" association. And as you might guess it, they don't help artists that much. Just their pockets.
It's old because the parliament shot it down after an active online campaign by internet activists and a couple of politicians with common sense.
Absurd (Score:3)
... how do they expect this to work !? People will simply buy storage in other EU countries. But I doubt anyway that such a farce could ever pass.
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Depends... (Score:5, Interesting)
Something like this is already in Finland [hyvitysmaksu.fi].
The rates in Finland are somewhat lower than those proposed for Portugal. Moreover, elsewhere on that site [hyvitysmaksu.fi] they say what consumers get in return: "Everyone is allowed to copy published works, such as music, movies, television and radio broadcasts for their own private use in Finland."
It is also quite clear [hyvitysmaksu.fi] that the compensation allows copying of movies and music on disks borrowed from libraries and suchlike. No doubt, the RIAA and MPAA would be a little queasy at such provisions in larger markets.
nitpicking: GB vs. GiB (Score:5, Insightful)
That means a 2TB device will in fact pile on €51.2 in taxes alone (2.5 cents times 2048GB).
Since when do manufacturers of hard drives use Base 2 to describe the size of their hard drives?
They don't, so it should be 50 € (2.5 cent times 2000 GB).
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Strictly speaking It's incorrect, but people do it - particularly where the pre-Euro currency didn't have a subunit.
€0.02, not €0.2 (Score:2)
Incorrect in summary and article.
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a 64GB iPhone could be €32 more expensive
Isn't 64 x €0.02 closer to €1.28? Even at the originally quoted €0.2 that sounds very high.
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There are different tariffs for different types of storage, the €0.02 tax figure I corrected is for hard disks of 150GB to 1TB, with smaller hard disks being tax exempt and larger hard drives at slightly higher tax (€0.025).
Mobile phones and similar (MP3 players?) would be taxed at €0.50 per GB so yes, a 64GB iPhone would be €32 more expensive.
USB pens and memory cards, €0.06 per GB.
Possibly the most ridiculous of all, photocopiers and multi-function printers will be taxed by how ma
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Aggravated tax? (Score:3)
I can understand that taxes might be aggravating, but was this summary written by a third grader? I'm pretty sure submitter meant aggregated (or more likely aggregate).
(He/she also meant affect.)
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Aggravated tax sends you into torpor. Vampires will surely be dodging this tax.
Now I can guess the MAFIAA's next scheme. (Score:2)
Non base 2 correction. (Score:2)
The price for a 2TB hard drive should only be $50, not $51.20 (sorry, don't have the euro symbol), since the size of drives have never been listed in base 2.
As for the topic at hand, that seems really crazy. That's about half the price of the hard drive in taxes alone.
Meanwhile, in Italy (Score:3, Informative)
the government has considered taxing SMSs by 0.02€ each. (This is not a joke)
Clout computing (Score:2)
Just one more tax... (Score:2)
Just one more tax and I'm sure all of the country's money problems will be solved. Just ONE more... Honest!
Re:Just one more tax... (Score:4, Interesting)
As long as they are still forced to buy war material from Germany and other EU countries instead of using that money to consolidate, I see little hope for Greece.
The whole "bailout fund" scam is nothing but a bailout for EU companies that sold crap to Greece and would now have to realize a loss.
Good for them (Score:2)
If they want to price storage out of the hands of the end users and thus cripple themselves then more power to them.
A tax like that is not going to do a damn thing for them because people won't be able to afford them and will either do without (and we get to read many MANY articles about how their aging tech running their government goes "tits up" on them) causing the government to not get any money or they find ways to smuggle the hard drives in on the black market also denying the government their tax mon
Penis Size Tax? (Score:5, Funny)
Tax Businesses (Including Churches) (Score:2)
Why pretend you're taxing businesses with a tax on technology? Just tax the businesses. Tax the things that most depend on government operations and expenses to work properly. Tax the things that actually make money that can be collected. Tax the things that cause sudden public expenses that must be bailed out.
Just put a sales tax on everything except necessities (used/homemade clothing, raw food, the cheapest 20% of shelter in each postal code and their utilities, minimum healthcare cost, public education,
Just tax the crap out of cell phones (Score:3)
See the efficacy of taxes is where you gouge something that most people can't or don't want to do without like gasoline, alcohol, tobacco. Cell phones are ubiquitous to the point where even the UN considers them a basic human right. So naturally the plan must be to gouge and gouge and gouge some more. Double, triple, quadruple the cost of handsets and data transmission.
Not compatible with the EU Common Market (Score:2)
My god (Score:2)
What is with all these bastards freeloading on the backs of others?
Their mindset: "Oh, you have something popular? Here, let us tax it, so we can get in on some of that money."
Higher taxes always leads to a thriving economy... (Score:2)
...NOT. Even JFK knew better than that (he cut taxes... something his party doesn't like to talk about).
Spain, Italy and Greece (Score:5, Funny)
Before long, Spain will have its Gigabyte Tax
Italy will chime in with its own Megabyte Tax
And Greece? They'll have the honor of having the world's first Kilobyte Tax
Re:Spain, Italy and Greece (Score:5, Funny)
Before long, Spain will have its Gigabyte Tax
Italy will chime in with its own Megabyte Tax
And Greece? They'll have the honor of having the world's first Kilobyte Tax
I guess that leaves the byte tax for Ireland.
Re:Spain, Italy and Greece (Score:5, Funny)
Before long, Spain will have its Gigabyte Tax
Italy will chime in with its own Megabyte Tax
And Greece? They'll have the honor of having the world's first Kilobyte Tax
I guess that leaves the byte tax for Ireland.
It's more like "Tax Bites" for the Irish :)
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I guess that leaves the byte tax for Ireland.
No problem. But if they create a litre tax in Ireland there will be a civil war!
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Byte my a--. if this won't create war. This steps on everyone's toes.
Re:Spain, Italy and Greece (Score:5, Insightful)
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The US doesn't have a storage quantity tax.
Honestly, such a tax is retarded, especially with the way storage increases (~1000x every 10-12 years?), you'd have to readjust the rates almost yearly. Anyway, you typically tax based on the prices of what is charged for purchasing/selling something - so, why not just put a % tax on storage devices, rather than a tax on the absolute amount of space.
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Re:Spain, Italy and Greece (Score:5, Insightful)
The unreasonable part is that you're putting a tax on something that is ridiculously changeable. Right now 1 Terabyte seems a lot, so to pay an extra few euro for a hard drive seems ok.
In 2002 the Canadian copyright lobby proposed a levy of 0.8 per megabyte on removable flash media and 2.1 per megabyte on non-removable storage in an audio player (in addition to the existing levy on blank audio tapes / cd's).
That means that the 16GB SD card I bought recently for my camera would have cost not $10 but $141 and a 32GB media player would be an extra $688.
Those sizes were unheard of in 2002 but only ten years later are commonplace. In another ten years, a gigabyte tax will probably be just as absurd.
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However, at 103 euro for a 2TB drive, that's pretty close to a 100% tax, and Moore's law says the tax rate will double every 18 months. Yikes! (yes, I know Moore's law applies to transistors, no
Re:Spain, Italy and Greece (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Spain, Italy and Greece (Score:5, Funny)
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The US doesn't have a storage quantity tax.
There is one obscure and largely irrelevant semi-exception: CD-R disks come in two flavors 'Data' and 'Music' [cdrfaq.org]. The latter are priced with the you-worthless-filthy-pirate-scum markup, the former aren't.
This distinction is, uh, deeply relevant to all owners of "Consumer stand-alone Audio CD recorders". "Professional" ones are not affected. Much more importantly, computers are not affected and I'm pretty sure that "Consumer stand-alone Audio CD recorders" are approximately as rare as unicorns...
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No, Germany has a tax only on empty media, but not on HDs.
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Re:Dear Portugal (Score:4, Interesting)
No, a tax on idiotic laws. Every time someone proposes a law that will be nixed by the supreme/constitutional court because it violates other laws, tax the idiot who wasted valuable parliament time to get a moment in the limelight.
Re:Dear Portugal (Score:5, Insightful)
No, a tax on idiotic laws. Every time someone proposes a law that will be nixed by the supreme/constitutional court because it violates other laws, tax the idiot who wasted valuable parliament time to get a moment in the limelight.
Hell with that. I want a "three strikes and you're a despot" law. If you voted "Aye" to violate my constitutional rights with some stupid law, and the supreme court overturns that legislation, and you've done this three times, you are guilty of being a serial tyrant and should be sentenced to not less than 10 years in a federal prison. That applies to everyone who voted for the law, not just the guy who signs it (although it could certainly start with him, as he took an oath to defend the Constitution when he entered office.)
No statute of limitations, either. You could be sleeping in your bed 10 years after leaving office, and if the Supreme Court overturns your 15-year-old crappy law, the ninjas bash down your door, haul you out of the arms of your mistress, and drag your butt to jail. None of these last minute help-my-buddy-in-the-industry-laws like pardons happening on the last days of office.
Congressional sessions would be over pretty damn quick, don't you think? Some idiot puts up a law written by lobbyists for the industry, and every other person in congress would immediately say "Um, I vote NO, right now. Who wants to go get a drink with me?"
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If we had a supreme court which weren't a bunch of right wing nut jobs you might have a point, but I'd like my elected officials to go against the wishes of the douche bags who gave us the Citizens United decision.
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I understand why the Citizens United decision is unpopular, but please explain why it was legally incorrect. Where in the constitution is the federal government granted the authority to restrict to whom and how much corporations can give money?
If you do not like the law, urge your representatives to change the constitution, do not ask the court to ignore it.
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Heck, I have a 1 TB drive only for Windows, which I use exclusively for gaming (who still uses Windows for serious work?), and all those games I got from Steam sales and barely play have already almost eaten up the drive. I'll have to delete the local caches or buy a bigger drive soon.
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I can't wait to see the tax legislation for that one. You would have to provide a receipt showing that you purchased and paid tax on that device. Then you would have to provide evidence that various blocks of storage were used for legitimate purposes. One tax dodge would be to have duplicate copies of everything. Tax inspectors would have to go round inspecting everyones backup strategies.
Re:€0.2 = €0,02? (Score:4, Informative)
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Taxes don't have to be raised, they have to be paid. Simple as that. As long as the large tax evaders can easily move money abroad without paying tax first, you can tax the crap out of people and won't get anywhere.
You can't squeeze lemon juice from a stone. Squeeze the lemons instead for a change. It might just work.
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You haven't been too long on this planet, have you? At least it's technically possible to execute that law, which is miles ahead of many others that have been proposed lately.
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I try to avoid slave work goods wherever I can. It ain't easy, especially in the area of electronics. I buy my coffee fair traded, I am as PC as they come.
But how many can afford that luxury? Because, yes, I'm "rich" by current standards. Meaning, I earn more money than I need for bare existence. It's a luxury not too many people have. They CANNOT avoid slave work goods, not because they don't care, simply because they cannot afford to pay the "luxury tax", i.e. the price tag attached to goods produced here
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Chinese people aren't threated by force into working in factories, they're forced because the alternative is worse. By not buying their products you're taking away their choice and helping to contribute to their famine.
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/smokey.html [mit.edu]
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Hello dear neighbor. It's by no means any better to the west of you, same deal. Actually, exactly same deal.
For fuck's sake, LET ME BUY THE CRAP! I want to pay to see shows I want to watch in a timely manner and before it gets butchered by dubbing. It simply is not offered.
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It's €0.02 per GB, not €0.2. Article and summary both get that wrong.
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to try to get money to artists
Yeah, right. To try to get money for themselves is more likely. The SPA and GDA are constantly trying to get off from actually paying the artists and authors.