slamboard

In Switzerland wealthy foreign residents who do not have any local earnings can negotiate a special annual tax fee that is based on their expenditure. This has been providing people like Shania Twain a lucrative discount compared to the income tax that they would pay in their home country.

The Swiss municipal governments may be in the process of deciding that this is too good to last. I can only assume that the slow process of deciding on a change is because they have to figure out how to squeeze some golden eggs out of these rich people with out squeezing too hard.

Source…

Anybody can get Joost these days. I gave up on the internet television thing because it wasn’t working for me. My ISP might be a big part of the problem. It is now out of Beta and all the early users have like dozens of invites to give out. It’s like Gmail used to be except Gmail works.

Professional Video Editing used to be revered as a kind of magic. Recently the plummeting cost of making video at home and the surge in popularity of video uploading sites has lead us to think that anybody can make a video.

Take a moment and look at a few videos. 99.99% of them look like crap don’t they?

Now look at a fake YouTuber, just go to most discussed or most viewed and pick somebody. I would say that in most cases the difference between a good video and a bad one is editing.

Professional post production services like those offered by MDFilms.net can add the finishing touches to a masterpiece of cinema, or they can make your schlocky commercial flow smoothly and look good.

YouTube has been making changes that may casual users may not have noticed. One relatively new feature is the ability to share your viewing history with other users. Your username is also visible on the page for videos that you have recently watched.

Some people may wish to keep their viewing patterns secret. They might not want their cool friends to know that they are closet lonelygirl15 fans, or they may search furtively for yet to be deleted pornography. Other people may want to use the feature in hopes of drawing people to their channel and their videos. Some people may actually use it as the fun social aspect that it was meant to be.

In pretty much every class of gadget, there is a subclass that is marketed based on its high level of durability. I’m not sure if there are tough desktop PC’s. I used to work in an industrial environment. The old 486 that ran the tally for the plant sat on a hand cut piece of upholstery foam to protect it from the vibration.

Tough laptops are commonplace. I just recently reviewed a great looking tough cell phone that was the same color and materials as DeWalt power tools. That is smart marketing. It was out of stock at the website.

I guess the basic premise of builing something tough is to imagine the possible adversities and compensate for them. What are the common enemies of gadgets? Basically, there is impact, vibration, dirt and water. Extreme temperatures may sometimes be an issues will atmospheric pressure.

Here is a story about a ToughBook that stopped a bullet.

The Beatles were phenominally successful. That being said, they did experience some failures.

They invested 100,000 pounds in a fashion boutique in 1967. It was called the Apple Boutique and the creative force behind it was known as ‘The Fool’. The staff was told to give everything in the store away one day in 1968.

Apple electronics never created any innovations and is most notable for it’s drawn out legal battles with Apple Inc.

Apple Inc. now owns the Apple name and licenses it to Apple Corps. Apple Corps was started because the Beatles accountant suggested that their money would be better spent on business ventures that remitted as taxes.

The Magical Mystery Tour was a flop.

Paul McCartney lost out on ownership of a large portion of the Beatles songbook…to Michael Jackson. The Beatles had sold the publishing rights years before to save on taxes. Snopes has an interesting page on this.

What you have to keep in mind is most of this poor management was because the money was coming in so fast from the Beatles’ main revenue stream, record sales. Almost every record the Beatles ever made was profitable. Capitol lost money on the US release of Yesterday and Today, largely because of a controversial image on the cover of the initial printing. An printing plant manager at the time of the recall kept a private stash of the Butcher Covers. When he sold them this century, the were fetching up to $40,000 each

This is the official word on the unofficial Google motto:

Our informal corporate motto is “Don’t be evil.”

Pretty simple, right? Maybe too simple.

Remember the famous Clinton quip about the definition of ‘is’ ?

With Google we have not one, but three words to dissect for obvious and hidden meanings.

I think the meaning of don’t is pretty inarguable. For some reason it’s meaning is a bit cloudy when I use the word in a sentence with my teen aged kids.

Be is essentially to exist, either in a certain state or just in absolute terms. Google employees might sometimes make the mental leap from be to appear to be. It’s a very short leap and requires no faith whatsoever. It’s like the difference between being busy and looking busy. It’s a distinction that people in large organizations don’t always care about that much. In fact, corporations exist so that there can be entities that can act an an individual financially and legally without having an actual human body associated with it. Corporation and corpse have the same root.

Here is the top ranking image for a Google Image search for Evil. The first page for this query has Osama, Bush, the Pope, Mike Meyers…you know the usual suspects.

A web search for Evil has the article in Wikipedia first. This quiz is #3. Maybe someone at Google should fill it out and get back to me.

Whoops, If you saw this post on a reader yesterday, you were looking at a first paragraph that was composed of the keyword I planned to use, I need to hire a professional writer.

Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses. You may be great at web design, market strategies, whatever. But if you can’t write copy that looks professional, your efforts will not give good results. There is a service that offers subscriptions to a freelance writer service. Whether you need a press release writer or a website writer or various other copywriter tasks, all you need to do once you are signed up is fill out a work order that provides keywords, URLs, and other information about your site and your target audience and they take it from there.

You end up with unique, keyword rich content that you didn’t have to agonize over.

Anheuser-Busch Cos recently took their Spykes malt beverages off the market because a court ruled that the mandatory health warnings were too small and that the background on the labels of some flavors made them hard to read.

I live outside of the US and there are different laws to protect consumers. My coffee cups do not warn me of their hotness in bold letters and exclamation points. My beer bottle does not warn me that his five friends might interfere with my motor function. In spite of this, I seem to function quite fine.

Source…

I am a bit of a history buff. I found it very interesting that people were doing that thing that we now call boycotting for many decades before someone named Boycott earned immortality through his action.

Charles Boycott was actually the representative of the British Crown in a place in Ireland where the tenants had organized and made the decision not to carry out the long held requirement of labouring for the Lord during harvest. Boycott made attempts to undermine this act of civil disobedience and he was subsequently ostracized in an overt and absolute way by the entire community.

Some Orangemen volunteered to carry out the harvest and 1,000 British soldiers protected them while they did it. It is estimated that the cost of bringing in £350 worth of potatoes was over £10,000.

Boycott left Ireland soon after.

When I found out about the details of the animal food tainting that was recently discovered, I had an emotional response. I was shopping for china of all things this week when the idea of a personal boycott came to mind. I remember being quite over the top with my insistence with regard to the boycott of South African products when I was a kid. I often look at the complexities of every issue these days. The issues of trade and ethics in China is hugely complex.