Maybe it’s different in the US, but in my country, age ratings on media aren’t the sector regulating itself. Film and TV are rated by an NGO (who issue ratings based on a list of criteria determined by government legislation), and games are rated by an organisation that is accountable to the government. So I’d consider both to be externally regulated, not self-regulated.
Can anyone name any sector that, when left to self-regulate, has actually behaved in a responsible and constructive manner? Any company that did the right thing in the absence of regulation telling them to?
It’s not only self-hosted email that is affected. My main email address is the one attached to my domain, which I’ve owned for over 20 years, and is managed by my webhosting company, a perfectly respectable, legitimate business that at one point handled about a third of all internet traffic in my country. This company is, nevertheless, not considered trustworthy enough for emails through their servers to reliably be delivered to their destination. I increasingly have to use an email address from a major multinational corporation because the email address from a merely large national corporation only has a 50/50 chance of reaching the recipient.
I can see how the richest 10% of the entire global population would include a fair chunk of the middle class in the richest nations. But the article specifies the richest 10% of many countries causing more emissions than the poorest 10% of their fellow citizens - and neither the richest nor poorest 10% of those countries are “middle class”. They definitely do not know what “middle” means.
Edit: reading further into the article, they do actually specify that the middle class of many rich countries are in the top 10% globally - anyone earning over £32k/$40k are in the top 10% for the entire global population, despite these being very modest incomes in the UK and US respectively.
While not accepting it as necessarily true… this feels like one of those cases where I wouldn’t be surprised if it was true.
No problem! :)
I think there genuinely is an issue where large businesses just aren’t checked as thoroughly as small ones. It’s much easier to check every invoice over X when there’s only a few thousand invoices, compared to when there’s millions or even hundreds of millions of invoices. There’s also the fact that the value of X varies based on the size of the business. I had a few really tiny clients where X was 10, because for the size of the business and the revenue they did, 10 was significant. There were others where X was 1000. Obviously at both of those thresholds, a gold toilet is going to stick out - and for the tiny business, would probably also trigger a money laundering/fraud report (no accountant-client confidentiality when financial crimes are being committed. This is another area where the big firms are given a lot of leeway that small ones are not).
So I can definitely see how for a megacorporation, the auditor may well conclude that no invoice for less than 1,000,000 is worth the effort of looking at, and it becomes quite easy to start sneaking through those gold toilets on <1,000,000 invoices if you know the auditor isn’t going to look at them.
As much as I have my doubts about AI, I think accountancy and audit is one of those professions where it could be a useful tool. If an AI could run through all the invoices and just flag the ones that look weird, regardless of value, for a human to take a closer look at, it would make a measurable difference - assuming a sufficiently unbiased and correctly trained AI, of course!
Inspecting every invoice? No. Inspecting large invoices? Yes. Inspecting large invoices not related to cost-of-sales? Yes. For one of our larger clients, their annual audit took 75% of the accountancy staff, in addition to the auditing staff, because every invoice over a certain threshold had to be looked at.
And if I’d seen an invoice for extensive renovations where some of the parts purchased looked questionable (like a solid gold toilet), I absolutely wouldn’t have taken that on faith as a genuine business expense that should be used to reduce profit, and would have questioned it. If there was a huge payment going out and no invoice to support it, I wouldn’t have taken it on faith that was a business expense. While it would have been up to my boss at the time whether it was included, it would have been negligent of me to see a massive invoice for something obviously excessive and not raise a query about its validity.
And yes, if there were questions about whether something large and excessive had genuinely been installed in the office rather than the business owner’s private home (and a gold toilet would invite questions like that), my boss would have asked to go and have a look before signing off on it being a business expense. And even then, if the gold toilet was in the business owner’s work office, it would likely still have been considered personal expenditure when it’s quite clearly excessive and quite clearly only for him personally. We have tax rules in this country that where a proportion of a business expense is determined to be personal in nature, it gets added back into the profit when the tax is calculated. While typically this is stuff like a business owner using the company van to run personal errands, or a farmer where part of the electricity and water use for the whole property applies to the living quarters (this is often estimated, like saying “5% of motor expenses, 10% of power and water, etc”, but the principle is that if a percentage is personal not business, then it’s not deductible for tax purposes), it would also apply to the inclusion of a gold toilet for personal use in an otherwise business-related office renovation.
Please read my disclaimer. I’m not from the US, and my experience is based on accountancy in my own country. No company in my country complies with SOX, because that’s a US law and doesn’t apply to the rest of the world.
While large corporations in this country are audited, they use the large auditors who have in fact been found to have done some pretty dodgy shit that a small auditor or accountant would not have gotten away with, while the regulators turn a blind eye. The large auditors also enable large companies to use tax loopholes that are not available to small businesses, so my point that closing the loopholes would make a big difference stands. And sure, the smaller accountants and auditors do this kind of crap too (corruption exists everwhere) - but the difference is that they’re held to account when they get caught. It is factually the case that those with more money don’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else.
I’m also not an accountant anymore. Did it for ten years and came to absolutely hate it as more of my time was spent on larger businesses. I loved working for the little guys, as overall I found them more reasonable. I never worked on any public companies, but I did work on a few charities (which have many similar rules to public companies in this country), and the corruption amongst the leadership was directly proportional to the size of the charity. There’s one major charity I won’t donate to anymore because I know just how much corruption there is at the top.
If a company has bought and “loaned” or given their executives cars, phones, food and rent stipends, paid for lavish parties with friends clients, bought out their family’s “startup” and put their kids on the payroll, started their own charity that functionally does nothing, and employed people to be their personal butler assistant, and contracted out their everything to other friend’s businesses, then those are considered “expenses”. The actual profit has been “reinvested back into the business” and the tax is applied to what is basically pocket change because the money has been spent. It doesn’t matter that the gold toilet in the CEO’s personal office bathroom isn’t necessary, it still counts as an expense. The core problem persists, the only thing it just changes the numbers on the documents.
The really annoying thing is this shit doesn’t fly for small businesses. I worked as an accountant for over ten years, for SME’s (small and medium enterprises), and there were extensive rules on what was and wasn’t allowed as an expense for tax purposes. There’s tax rules on cars, phones, etc given to executives that ensure somebody is paying tax on it, and there’s tax rules on capital investment/reinvestment in the business that separates it from business expenses for tax purposes (basically, tax is generally calculated based on what’s on the profit&loss, not the balance sheet, and investment is a balance sheet item).
A lot of good could be done by ensuring large businesses are forced to comply by the same tax rules as small ones - and accountants for large businesses that try to hide the owner’s personal expenditure amongst business expenditure should be held to the same standards as accountants for small businesses. If I’d tried to deliberately pass off a gold toilet as a business expense for a client, I wouldn’t just have gotten fired. I’d have gotten arrested for fraud. Accountancy is a regulated profession, but the big accountancy companies often just ignore the regulations that would get a smaller company in a lot of trouble.
So yeah, I broadly agree with you. This move by Germany is meaningless without some serious overhaul of how tax laws apply (or don’t apply) to large corporations and their accountants. Closing all the loopholes so there’s no legal route to reducing profit without genuine business expenses (not fake, made-up “expenses”) would make it much harder for companies to bend the rules to their favour.
~Disclaimer: all the above is based on my experience with accountancy in my own country. Legislation and tax rules vary by geography.
Yep! Could I make it work if I had the time? Probably. I might have just gotten unlucky with my previous attempt, or it didn’t like my specific GPU (or it was actually a different component that was causing the problem, despite all the error messages pointing to GPU). But Linux definitely isn’t in “it just works” stage for everyone, and for every person who can say it worked fine out of the box, there’s someone else who can say it wouldn’t work no matter what they did. The hardware combinations for desktops, especially self-built ones, is nearly infinite, and some combinations will be more finicky than others.
Yeah, I’m thinking in a few years, when I have time to play around with my OS, Mint will be the one I try. I still have some reservations about the enormous number of variables that have to be just right, though: when you’re a gamer and an artist, the list of games, drivers, and software that need to play nicely is quite long!
Yep! Every OS requires the user to pay something, and that’s either money or time - or a certain amount of tolerance for creepiness.
Yeah, it’s an Nvidia GPU on Ubuntu. I tried several versions of the proprietary Nvidia drivers and some open source ones I located via Ubuntu’s Additional Drivers application, and they all left my computer in an unusable state, but in different ways.
Buying a new GPU isn’t an option at the moment, and… yeah, just don’t have enough time to go experimenting with different distros to find the right combination of hardware compatibility and features. I still think it was a worthwhile experiment, and I’m glad I gave Linux a try. But it’s not the right OS for where I’m at right now.
I tried a well-supported Linux distro over the summer, and it’s severely not-compatible with my GPU. An OS that crashes every 10 minutes with the FOSS drivers and runs slower than continental drift with the proprietary drivers isn’t a viable alternative to Windows. At some point in the future I might run through a bunch of other distros to see if there’s one that is stable with my hardware, but I honestly don’t have enough time in my life to do that right now. I went back to Windows because I could install it in an hour and be done with it for the next year or two.
There are people who have the patience to continuously fight with their OS in order to get it to do what they want it to… but they’re a small subset of the population. Most people just want their computer to work, and until Linux has that (or until we completely reorganise society so that everyone has both the time and money to be able to spend time making their computer work rather than using the computer), there’s not going to be a rush of people abandoning Windows.
I love the idea of Linux, but was not happy with the stability and support at this point in time. I’m more computer-literate than the average person, and even using a well-supported Linux distro, I found the documentation haphazard and in some cases plain wrong (or severely out of date?) If I struggled with it, I certainly wouldn’t expect people less comfortable with computers to have any capacity to install or run Linux. For all Windows’ flaws (of which there are many), it makes owning and using a computer easy, allowing you to just get on with the work you need to do.
Heard the same suggestion on a podcast recently as well, IIRC. And she’s got party leadership ambitions. At least if she gets it, the Tories will be unelectable for at least a decade. Nutella Suella is appealing to the far right, but absolutely abhorrent to anyone to the left of that. Even centre right people think she’s absolutely deranged and would rather have a Labour government than her.
I honestly can’t see myself ever using something like this. Aside from any other considerations about the ethics of AI and how potentially creepy this device is… I’m a visual person. I don’t even use voice controls, or indeed the actual phone call option on my phone unless I have to, because I process the world better by looking at it. Having to control a device primarily by talking to it rather than interacting with it via a visual display is a deal breaker for me.
Even if you’d said you were “just” a software developer, not even a head of a small team of developers, I’d still work on the assumption that you know more about software development than a CEO and a marketing person. Relevant professional experience gives you much more credibility than they had. :)
I guess they just sort of… bullshit their way through life, and so few people call them on it that they just keep getting more power based on nothing more than them manipulating people into believing they’re more competent than they are. And because they just say a lot of bullshit, they think everybody else does too, and so they don’t listen when they’re given real information from people that actually know what they’re talking about.
I just had to scroll back up to double check what you said your job was, because I was sure you said you were in charge of software development, and then I thought, “no, I must be misremembering that, because there’s no way the CEO and marketing person could genuinely believe that they know more about open source software development than a software developer.” But no, you really did say your job was head of software development, and the CEO and marketing person really did think they know more than you.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is very real in marketing and executives.
I suspect that the games industry has managed to self-regulate its own ratings in large part because TV and film ratings are so often codified in law. It provides a baseline for what is and isn’t acceptable for certain audiences, and makes it obvious that regulation will happen one way or another. The existing TV and films ratings systems also create an environment where the consumer expects something similar for games. Regulation of visual entertainment has basically been normalised for the entire lifetime of most people alive today.
I think it also explains why the games industry has been bad at self-regulating on gambling stuff like lootboxes/etc. When a game has graphic violence or sex, it’s easy to draw a comparison with film and TV, and pre-emptively self-regulate. The gaming industry can manage that because everybody involved is familiar with film and TV - and may even have worked in that industry before, since there are many skill overlaps. But the organisations and institutes doing the ratings would seem less familiar with the gambling industry, and therefore haven’t given enough thought to how they ought to self-regulate on that. There’s a sufficient lack of self-regulation on lootboxes/etc that external regulation appears to be necessary.
And I think this ultimately highlights why AI will need external regulation. The only sector that has successfully self-regulated is one that already had a base of comparison with a separate-but-similar sector that has an existing history of regulation. AI doesn’t have anything comparable to use as a baseline. While game devs could look at the history of film and TV regulation and make a good guess as to what would happen if they didn’t regulate themselves, the AI devs think they’re untouchable.