Death and Taxes

The two certainties in life are death and taxes. The UK vat rules say that some foods are vat exempt and others luxury goods are charge at 15%. For HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) details can be found here

The most famous case in law was that of

HM Revenue & Customs v Mc Vities. The manufacturers of Jaffa Cakes, McVities classified them as cakes, and were taken to a court by Customs and Excise, who argued that they were in fact chocolate covered biscuits, and so liable for VAT.

McVities defended their case by making a very large Jaffa Cake in order to demonstrate that they really were just mini cakes. They also argued that biscuits go soft when left exposed to the air for long periods, and cakes go hard and since Jaffa Cakes go hard when left out, they were in fact cakes. McVities won their case, and VAT is not charged on Jaffa Cakes.

So it was a pleasant surprise today to see that from my receipt from Tesco Metro that Monster Munch (orginal pickled onion) are a luxury good and charged at 15% and eaten by the decadent and that Pot Noddles (Spicy curry) are essential food stuff and charged at 0%. It's a funny old world.

Sign of things to come

As I've mention previously myrail lite was closing down on 31st March . So I looked at the new app from National Rail Enquires and it £4.99 ouch. So I looked at other countries and found the SBB one is free. Is this another sign of rip off Britain or a sign of the future were we'll be paying a lot more for day to day infomation.

Spoof FT

Reclaim the Streets have produced a spoof of the Financial Times for the year 2020.

http://ft2020.com/

Note: server was a bit slow when i looked as it took a while to load the page up.

Deleted my account of facebook

Well I think facebook has served its use and now is getting more and more filled with Spam. Therefore I've taken the decision to delete my facebook account and withdraw all my content from their service and not a moment too soon given the news report below which says 'Government plans to track the correspondence of millions on social networking sites have been met with fierce criticism'

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5973731.ece

The private correspondence of millions of people who use social networking sites could be tracked and saved on a “big brother” database, under new plans being drawn up by the UK government.

Ministers revealed yesterday that they were considering policing messages sent via sites such as MySpace and Facebook, alongside plans to store information about every phone call, e-mail and internet visit made by everyone in the United Kingdom.