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“Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society” – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
And in a modern society there are many different forms of taxation, each with their own rationale and purpose. While it would be impractical to address all the concerns with taxation, one that stands out is excise taxation of items deemed harmful to society.
The claim is that this tax is levied to pay for the damage caused to society as well as used as a way to raise prices in an effort to reduce use. The final step of my move across Canada in early 2016 was to take a flight out to Victoria BC. I chose to bring my home server with me on the flight as I wanted to get it back up and running as soon as possible rather than having it sit in a moving box for months. Unfortunately, it was damaged by Air Canada during transit.
The computer was packed in the box the case came in, along with all the foam padding that it was originally shipped with. There was a lot of complaining when the agreed format for releasing pirated content was updated in 2012. A similar change has started to take place again, except this time the release groups have actually gotten it wrong.
In 2012 the SD content format was changed from the long-standing AVI format, to the newer MP4 format. This represented a change in format as well as encoding, with the older XviD being replaced with the much newer, more efficient, H264. With a saturated market of available credit cards, offerings need to provide increasingly more value-added features with their cards to differentiate themselves from the similar basic functionality offered by all credit cards. But with so many added features being offered in such a wide range of forms it is hard to know if these features are really adding any practical value to the user.
One of the most popular added features offered to customers is rewards points based on a percentage of the value of purchases made. Companies seem to always be looking for new ways to integrate technology into products. The reality though, is that there are some types of products that are better suited and some that are worse off with the increased inclusion of technology. The automotive sectoris a prime example of an industry that, on a multitude of levels, is not yet ready for this increased level of technological integration.
Although the mechanical, and even stylistic, aspects of luxury cars often age quite well, making them usable for many years, the technology being integrated into the dashboard of these cars shows its age very quickly.