huhtenberg 3 months ago

There's also Converse that adds a piece of cloth to the soles of their sneakers to be able to classify them as slippers for "taxation purposes".

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-is-why-your-c...

  • breakingcups 3 months ago

    Wonder if you could either sue them for delivering an insufficient product (it does not function as a slipper under the definition for longer than a day after walking) or keep returning them under warranty.

walthamstow 3 months ago

Hoo boy we have some classics in that category in the UK.

My personal fave is when morning TV host Lorraine Kelly successfully argued she wasn’t hosting as herself but acting a character called Lorraine Kelly, with very favourable tax consequences.

  • seanhunter 3 months ago

    There was also the famous decision in the Jaffa Cake case where the VAT treatment depended on whether or not a Jaffa cake was a cake or a biscuit https://standrewseconomist.com/2023/12/31/let-them-eat-cake-...

    The tribunal decided that Jaffa Cakes were cakes because when they go stale they go hard like a cake whereas a biscuit tends to go soft when it goes stale.

    • ryao 3 months ago

      I remember hearing about this because the one who wanted it classified as a biscuit proposed the test that determined it was a cake. That is the sole reason I remember this story.

    • walthamstow 3 months ago

      There’s another one about Walkers taste sensations poppadom snacks. Question was, is it a crisp or not? Can’t remember the outcome

    • EspadaV9 3 months ago

      Which was a silly case to bring forward because they are clearly a cake. It's literally a sponge cake bottom.

  • eitally 3 months ago

    This is akin to Fox News arguing in court that it is, in fact, entertainment and not news, despite it's name.

    • thunky 3 months ago

      It's true though. All cable news is "entertainment news", not "news".

      Nobody should have been getting their "news" from Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon, or Rachel Maddow.

      IMO they shouldn't be allowed to call themselves news without putting entertainment in front.

      • ash_091 3 months ago

        Absolutely- even as a lifelong leftie, I find the rhetoric on CNBC just as sickening as that on Fox.

        I've (somewhat sardonically) wondered if they're both false flag operations. Imagine CNBC started with the idea "we'll parody the left to make them seem radical and unreasonable" but accidentally developed a huge following who didn't get the joke.

      • dingnuts 3 months ago

        Thank you for pointing this out. Carlson and Maddow made nearly identical arguments in court and if both are not mentioned in the same breath, the speakers bias is instantly displayed to anyone who is educated on this topic.

        > IMO they shouldn't be allowed to call themselves news without putting entertainment in front.

        Agreed but the average person wouldn't understand that Entertainment News was different than News. The problem goes deeper. I despair.

    • _n_b_ 3 months ago

      What Fox News argued was a bit more nuanced than that all of Fox News isn't news. Rather, "Fox successfully argued that one particular segment on Tucker Carlson’s show could only be reasonably interpreted as making political arguments, not making factual assertions, and therefore couldn’t be defamation."[1]

      That feels like a fairly reasonable assertion for anybody watching Tucker Carlson.

      [1] https://popehat.substack.com/p/fox-news-v-fox-entertainment-...

      • skrebbel 3 months ago

        I know nothing about the case but isn't that a little like saying "look, we weren't lying, cause we never said we were saying the truth"?

      • vixen99 3 months ago

        Political argument, as such, is worthwhile insofar as it can cause me to reexamine my own preconceptions. Facts I can pick up almost anytime.

    • TeMPOraL 3 months ago

      Isn't it also how, many years ago, Top Gear got away with a hit job on Tesla by claiming they're just an entertainment show, so they're not obligated to do honest or truthful reviews?

  • immibis 3 months ago

    Alex Jones argued this, with the obvious implication, that whoever buys Infowars also owns the character of Alex Jones, and Alex Jones cannot play Alex Jones any more without infringing their copyright. (But I suspect this incoming government doesn't care to apply logical consistency to his case)

  • Corrado 3 months ago

    I think Steven Colbert hosted a show using himself as the host. I’m not sure about the tax implications though.

    • gwbas1c 3 months ago

      And then when he tried using the "Steven Colbert" character on a different show, Comedy Central threatened him because Steven Colbert does not have rights to the "Steven Colbert" character.

      • kjs3 3 months ago

        Al Shugart started Shugart Associates and pretty much created the 5 1/4" floppy market. He sold to Xerox. He later started Shugart Technology and was promptly threatened with a lawsuit because he literally had sold his rights to his own name (in the particular context). He changed the name to Seagate Technology and the rest is history.

        Yes, you can be enjoined from using your own name.

      • bloomingkales 3 months ago

        That doesn’t seem like that should be possible. He sold his identity for life? Hollywood really does ask for your soul huh.

        It would make sense why he’s never even jokingly gone back into that character on his new show.

    • DFHippie 3 months ago

      If there were any tax implications, they were incidental. The show was parody, so the opinions he espoused in character were necessarily ones he didn't actually hold.

    • technothrasher 3 months ago

      I'm pretty sure that was Chuck Noblet pretending to be Steven Colbert.

  • panzi 3 months ago

    I'm not from the UK, but wasn't there also a cake Vs biscuits thing for tax reasons?

  • FireBeyond 3 months ago

    I had a friend that argued that Marshall Mathers (Eminem) could never actually be sued for defamation because most of the defamatory things "he" said wasn't actually him saying it, but Slim Shady.

    Hah.

Pawka 3 months ago

Sounds insane. But what is more surprising to me - is why dolls were taxed differently than other toys. At first glance, it looks like stupid rules force to play silly games.

  • soco 3 months ago

    Some trade war from the XIX century or something? Or maybe because dolls were historically thought for girls?

    • RobotToaster 3 months ago

      Possibly, bisque and china dolls were often imported from Germany.

  • pkphilip 3 months ago

    In India, the pizza base has a different tax rate than the topping and so some restaurants will have two separate lines on your pizza bill - one for the base at 5% tax and another for the topping at 18% tax.

    The tax on popcorn is also totally crazy. "Unpackaged and unlabelled popcorn with salt and spices is categorised as 'namkeen' and taxed at 5%. Pre-packed and labelled ready-to-eat popcorn attracts a 12% GST rate. Caramelized popcorn with added sugar is taxed at a higher rate of 18%."

    • xandrius 3 months ago

      All those make sense and are pretty common: bread is taxed lower than most pizza toppings.

      Raw ingredients are taxed less than ready-to-eat or sugar-coated ultra-processed good. And I'm totally ok with that.

      • jonhohle 3 months ago

        But a pizza as a whole is a ready-to-eat good. And a pizza isn’t a pizza without the crust.

        • xandrius 3 months ago

          What I think is happening is that the place is specifically charging different tax rates for each part of the pizza. That does seem odd but the alternative would be to tax the whole of the pizza at a higher tax rate than the one presented. Example, most countries might put a whole pizza at, say, 10% VAT, while here part of it is at, say, 4% and the rest at 10%. Ideally that's cheaper.

    • dTal 3 months ago

      The pizza thing seemed incredibly silly to me. Surely the restaurant has already paid the tax when they bought the raw ingredients? Must any product served in a restaurant be taxed according to the rate of the most highly taxed ingredient in it, regardless of proportion?

      So I looked it up. And yes, that is exactly the case, and it's an absurd situation that is causing massive headaches.

      https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-63281037

    • lazide 3 months ago

      Luxury vs premium vs ‘esssential’ at work eh?

  • liontwist 3 months ago

    This. It’s a pretty reasonable answer to a stupid question. Dolls depict people.

  • RugnirViking 3 months ago

    did you get a second glance? did you figure out why they are taxed differently?

K0balt 3 months ago

Or my shirt that has a tiny, useless pocket on the inside of my shirt (down where it might often be tucked inside of your waistband.) It has a tag with a picture of sunglasses on it, and a reasonably sized pair of sunglasses might just tenuously perch inside.

This makes it a jacket, and jackets are taxed at a lower rate than shirts.

The same shenanigans more or less work for most types of taxation. There’s always an angle to reduce or even eliminate taxes, unless you work on salary or for wages. It’s clear who the system is built for lol.

  • indymike 3 months ago

    You ought to see the magic they do when coding medical procedures for billing in the US. It makes these tax shenanigans look simple.

  • redox99 3 months ago

    Why would jackets even be taxed differently than shirts. It's so silly.

    • lazide 3 months ago

      Freezing to death is worse than looking nice?

    • wruza 3 months ago

      It’s a silly world where people who never worked send people who only worked as mobsters to take money from people who work for a living. Then the first two groups share that money in 999999:1 proportion. They call it “taxation”.

      It has upsides like having an army for defense, roads and other common things. But don’t forget the primary nature and motivation behind it. They just want your money, and your offspring to please them in various ways.

    • ramses0 3 months ago

      5% of a $100 jacket is $5

      15% of a $33 shirt is $5

      5% of a $33 jacket is $1.65

      ...it's definitely gamesmanship but if you squint you can see where it comes from.

      • sharpshadow 3 months ago

        This reminds me of maybe the worst tax in human history which is also unconstitutional. The Pauschalabgabe[0] in Germany, which also got adopted in other countries, implements a freely decidable flatrate tax on all mediums which can be used to create a pirated copy.

        How much tax for a laser printer? Well it depends how fast it prints:

        Up to 14 pages/Minute: 25,00 € Up to 39 pages/Minute: 50,00 € From 40 pages/Minute: 87,50 €

        For every storage medium this tax has been paid, because of the possibility of making a pirated copy. Technically we all paid already to make pirates copies.

        0. https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauschalabgabe

  • rtkwe 3 months ago

    I don't think I've ever seen that on any of my shirts here in the US. Is this in the US?

    • K0balt 3 months ago

      I believe it was sold into the US market originally. I bought it second hand in a secondary market that sources its used articles primarily from the USA and Canada.

      • rtkwe 3 months ago

        How odd I don't know that I've ever seen one in such a weird position.

        • K0balt 3 months ago

          It would actually be way to miss. If it hadn’t been marked with a sunglasses emblem, I would have easily thought it was just a gusset. It’s just one of the bottom front corners of the left side of the shirt, with a triangular gusset that is big enough to just hold 2/3 of a pair of glasses, mesh, in this particular case.

rsynnott 3 months ago

This sort of thing happens relatively often; Sony also tried (unsuccessfully) to have the PS2 deemed a personal computer (which would have lead to 0 tariffs in the EU): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yabasic#PlayStation_2

  • theshrike79 3 months ago

    IIRC the PS3 Linux option existed because of this same tariff.

  • ToucanLoucan 3 months ago

    I often wonder what the ROI is on this. How much did Sony have to pay engineers to implement this interesting but seemingly pretty useless functionality vs. what it actually saved them in the aforementioned tariffs? I know the knee jerk reaction is to say it obviously saved them some money or they wouldn't have done it, but I've seen far too much corporate stupidity in my life to take that as a given. I'd love to see the data.

    • rsynnott 3 months ago

      Well, in the end it didn't save them anything, because the EC didn't accept that having a toy basic interpreter made what was obviously a games console a PC. I can't imagine it was terribly expensive in the scheme of things, though.

      • throwaway48476 3 months ago

        If it can run a desktop linux environment it's a PC. That said it probably should only count if the preinstalled software is Linux and not some games OS.

    • pwg 3 months ago

      When you ship millions of units of the kit, you only need a small savings per unit for the sum total to become a big enough saving to be noticeable to the financial dept. bean counters.

    • PetitPrince 3 months ago

      Maybe it was just a passion project for the engineers or even Ken Kutaragi ? See also Net Yarose, Linux For Playstation 2, Other OS & Yellow Dog Linux for Playstation 3.

      • spookie 3 months ago

        For sure, they had very interesting architectures. Used even in supercomputers as a number of them in parallel

magicalhippo 3 months ago

Or when the makers of Jaffa Cakes baked a giant 12 inch version[1] and brought it to the court to argue they were cakes and not biscuits to get lower VAT.

[1]: https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/10/time-compan...

  • petepete 3 months ago

    I wish supermarkets would put them on the cake aisle instead and keep the biscuit aisle pure.

    • fennecbutt 2 months ago

      Most UK bikkies are meh, though. I have to import ones from NZ here to survive.

      Mallowpuffs are so much better than tea cakes. Squiggles, Tim tams, chit chats, sultana pasties, griffins macaroons, toffee pops, hundreds and thousands, mint slice.

      Whereas here it's mostly shortbread or bourbons/custard creams.

tommica 3 months ago

Which is fucking hilarious when you think that a lot of xmen storyline is about them wanting to be perceived as humans

  • rickdeckard 3 months ago

    Which legally probably also makes it a fairy tale

    "It's a nice story and the court won't prevent you from telling it, but legally these beings in that story are clearly NOT humans"

    Hilarious.

  • [removed] 3 months ago
    [deleted]
  • recursive 3 months ago

    Pretty much fits. It probably wouldn't be such an issue if they were just human.

  • marcosdumay 3 months ago

    And also, they are an "on your face" depiction of the dehumanization of the Holocaust victims...

    • alasdair_ 3 months ago

      And Professor X is Martin Luthor King and Magneto is Malcolm X.

    • JBiserkov 3 months ago

      Whoa, whoa, wait a minute! I can't have POLITICS in my comics, my comics are apolitical, there's good guys and bad guys, and it's always clear who the bad guys are - those that are not [like] me! /s

lmm 3 months ago

Sounds like Ford putting seats in the back of their vans so they could pay less tax when importing them from Mexico, then removing them before they're sold. Looks like they've now been fined, but they got away with it for a while.

Ntrails 3 months ago

A bunch of fun articles around these areas in the UK (free to read, think you might need an account though - apologies). Two food and one toy:

https://www.ft.com/content/5af5b182-349a-4a25-b4fb-4551908f2...

https://www.ft.com/content/a6a54008-6059-4052-99ae-282f148f2...

https://www.ft.com/content/a8d6413e-1184-4f89-9bcb-4f6cb8d7a...

panosfilianos 3 months ago

I wonder if there is any place where one can look up all these sort of creative legal-tax shenanigan stories. They are so fun and such an interesting lens to see what _is_ via this interlinked, case-specific web of events.

steveBK123 3 months ago

When Trump set a tariff on German optics because he was mad at Germany, Leica had a workaround as well.

Most of their equipment is made in Portugal and finished in Germany, with whatever WTO agreed % of value added that allows them to stamp "Made In Germany" on the goods.

So for US markets they issues a series of lenses that were more fully finished in the Portuguese factory such that they could be stamped "Made In Portugal".

moomin 3 months ago

In universe, arguing the X-Men are not human would put you firmly in the villain category.

  • woodrowbarlow 3 months ago

    exactly, that was core to the whole plot; oppressed mutants fighting to have their basic human rights recognized.

    • TeMPOraL 3 months ago

      So it turns out that the final boss denying mutants their humanity are... the tax authorities.

  • JBiserkov 3 months ago

    Capitalists? in the villain category? Impossible!

reverendsteveii 3 months ago

This has interesting implications for the Marvel canon, as the conflict between average humans and mutants is a primary plot driver for x-men

autoexec 3 months ago

> Reminds me of when lawyers successfully argued that X-Men are not human

Isn't that true though?