Friday, 31 May 2013

INTERNET POLICE

17TH JULY 2014 - The UK Government has used the public's loathing of child abusers to shoehorn in, literally overnight, a new 1984 Total Surveillance law - DRIP - which requires all telephone and internet providers to retain all records of all telecoms and internet use on all citizens, in perpetuity. And, of course, to give total access to government agencies. This contrasts with German Chancellor Angela Merkel's and EU demands that the US (and the UK) stop meta-data and personal e-spying on family, friends and foes alike.

Conservative PM, David Cameron, insists that he and DRIP are keeping us all safe in beds - safe from Terrorists and Sex Abusers; and that "IF YOU HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE, then you have nothing to fear" - the assurance offered by all mad dictators and secret police. This coincides with a new inquiry into sex abuse by senior UK political figures - allegedly including top Tory figures - who among other unpleasant habits beat and sodomised little boys trapped in government "Care Homes", from about 1950 to date; probably all Friends of Jimmy Savile.

To demonstrate the urgent need for DRIP, UK police have, on the same day the snooping law was passed, arrested 660 UK pedophiles who have been accessing and swapping vile images of abused children. Only 39 of those arrested were previously on the Sex Offenders register. A police investigator for OPERATION NOTARISE said there are 50,000 Brits who use such illegal criminal pornography. An academic expert from UCL, on BBC Newsnight 16th July, claimed that 1 in 6 UK children are sexually abused; which is so unlikely that he ought to check his data and insane calculations.

FUTURIST VIEW - So, what are the consequences? Government will know what all citizens are doing on-line and no records will be deleted. Any attempt to block surveillance and keep business confidential will be an immediate target for zealous snoopers. This will accelerate the growth of the unhackable (so far) INTERNET 2 called MESHNET and other wireless networks. It will also enable TAX COLLECTORS to gather cast iron evidence of tax and money frauds going back decades, which will cause a run on the world's 74 tax-havens. On-shoring will greatly accelerate from now - in 2014. For child-abusers, terrorists and tax-evaders there is nowhere safe to hide.

********************

Theresa May, MP for Maidenhead, Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equalities - and other government officials, have leapt onto the "evil internet" platform constructed this week by the hysterical UK media, reporting on the life-sentence given to a paedophile, a crazed, depraved and vicious child killer. The child was a five years old little girl. 

This "government control of the internet" Big-Brother lobby whips up popular hysteria whenever there is an alleged "terrorist attack" - such as the off-duty soldier hacked to death in London last week by a couple of meandering lunatics - or any feverishly florid news about the imagined, allegedly millions of British paedophiles stalking vulnerable victims via the Internet. 

This determined, persistent lobby group want to record ALL telephone and Internet traffic for years and make it available to all government officers. This month they looked for support from the major ISPs - Google, Microsoft etc but were today rebuffed by the industry, who said in effect, "The UK would be the only nation in the world to have such restrictive, draconian surveillance of all citizens. Subsequent, extreme governments could abuse such data."

Master civil servant, Cardinal Richelieu, 1585-1642, said, to paraphrase "Have an innocent man write six sentences, and I'll find enough in them to hang him." Theresa May would have us all believe that 90% of UK men are plotting sex or terrorist attacks and they can all be stopped by snoopers recording and reading everyone's telecommunications (and what about the old mail service, Mrs May?). This is a hugely disproportionate response to "new" technology. She would certainly find enough to hang us all.



SPOT THE LOONY!


Where do we start sanely analyzing the real data to counter the Harlem Witch Trial or medieval Witch Finder General hunt by the UK's politicians, intent on stopping all unauthorized communications and web-searches? "Please Mrs May, could I send an email or text to my sister?" 

Above - today's statistics from the BBC show globally we send 124.5 billion emails a day - any one of these could be from/to a UK citizen. The average UK cellphone sends 25 texts a day - about 1 billion UK texts. 33 million UK citizens use the Internet every day - I wonder what sites they visit? Of those with private Internet access, 100% of men aged 16 to 80 and 42% of women aged 16 to 46 have looked at porn sites. Despite powerful social and religious taboos, we are sexually curious beings. 

From 2006 to 2012, UK Internet access  has doubled. A 2004 survey by Prof. B Kahr, Tavistock Institute, London, confirmed by Time Magazine, extrapolated that 9 million UK men and 1.4 million UK women downloaded porn that year. With double the Internet numbers, by 2012, the voyeurs will also have doubled. 94% of  Internet content is NOT porn - but 6%  might be classified as porn. 

And - if The Witch Finder General is right in blaming the internet for increasing crime, the numbers of sex and terrorist crimes will have at least doubled. Will they not?

But no! "Intimate violent crime" which includes rape and sexual abuse of children has at worst stayed flat since 2000 and some categories have fallen significantly. Violent attacks on adults, terrorist or otherwise, have reduced. The Internet has not caused a wave, a tsunami of  sexual or "radicalized - religious" crimes.

The major cardinal sin about which most hysteria is deliberately whipped up by the UK Curb-the-Net fanatics is child sex abuse - paedophilia - or in incorrect American spelling, pedophilia. Over the decades and centuries, abuse of children has fallen dramatically, and sexual abuse of children has also greatly diminished. Most such abuse is still by parents and close relatives - appalling bullying and incest in the time honoured way, in closed nuclear families and orphanages, without any stimulus needed from the Internet. The largest recent UK pedophile attacks were by a wave of vicious male bullies in the 1970's with access to government  run orphanages and "care" homes in North Wales. Numbers of top people were implicated as beating and sodomizing helpless boys over several years; to date, in 40 years, the criminals and suspects names have not been revealed. The North Wales sex gangs operated long before the Internet existed. From 2003 to last year a gang in Oxford UK groomed and terrified children as sexual victims, selling them to groups of old men to be raped, drugged and bullied; the Internet played no part - the gangs revolved around Children's Homes and late night fast food shops. Police and Social workers ignored the children's anguished cries for help for 4 or 5 years. It seems that government "carers" are a far greater threat than is the Internet.

There might even be a valid psychological argument for "better out than in" - the psychotherapy concept that finding safe release for violent fantasies reduces "acting out" - turning fantasy into horrible actual reality. Internet porn might be a safety release valve for some otherwise dangerous people. It is statistically not a crime trigger for the vast majority.

There are 50 child murders in the UK each year. Some of these are sexually motivated. There are thousands of "Intimate" sexual crimes against children - ranging from "flashing" to groping to penetration. Such awful, bullying crimes long predate the invention of telephones, telecoms, Internet and mobile phones. Victorian brothels were crammed with kids and pedophiles - exercising Good Sound Victorian Values. Caligula filled his large bath with naked children. The Duke of Wharton in 1719 hosted orgies for friends at the Hellfire Club - the top attraction being young virgins. Today, child sex crimes and murders are mostly "in the family" and at government, school, music or religious institutions. The arch British BBC paedophile, Jimmy Savile, now with hundreds of identified victims, started his perversions well before the Internet, desktop PCs or mobile phones - relying on government institutions, hospitals and BBC studios to supply his victims. 

I agree that depictions of extreme violence, sexual, terrorist or otherwise, ought to be edited out of the Internet and all media. A sensible 50 year old woman last week told me that the images from a TV documentary about primitive societies casting out demons from young children, would not leave her and gave her sleepless nights. Horror informs and reforms us despite our best intellectual barriers - it gets in. But, maybe, having seen the children being tortured (by parents)  she will take action to help stop the abuse. 

My message - after studying relevant statistics since 2005 - is that government must avoid knee-jerk reactions; should not believe street gossip and everything they read in the papers; and must respond proportionately. Recording and analyzing billions upon billions of messages is utter insanity - and will lead to thousands of Cardinal Richelieu wrongful arrests, witch-hunts - and endless media hysterics. Eleven children are killed by strangers each year in the UK - perhaps half the killers used Internet child-porn, which stimulated their odious crimes - but there is no scientific proof or even studies to support that view. 

DO THE MATHS

Blaming the internet is like blaming the road network for enabling bank robberies. IF, eleven horrible, evil murderers do access child-porn on the net - they represent 0.0006%, one in every million, of male internet users; who would almost certainly find such images without the Internet - as such insane people have for thousands of years.

Eleven child murders a year are eleven too many. Several hundred thousand intrusive gropes and rapes are a plague of bullying sex-pests who should be prosecuted for assault. But, we kept society reasonably safe before the days of electricity - we can do so now without blanket Big-Brother surveillance of the daily communications of the 99.9994% of non-criminal Internet users.   




Tuesday, 28 May 2013

TAX-HAVEN LONDON -v- 50% JOBLESS

28th May 2013 - EU data shows there are 7.5 million unemployed European youths consigned to the scrapheap. Catastrophe Warning on EU Youth Unemployment. There is $21 trillion to $32 trillion buried offshore by the super-rich, equivalent to 70 million jobs. The UK Prime Minister has just approved his chief tax collector's new job with one of the Big 4 tax-planners, sending out a strong signal that tax-evaders are safe in Britain and in the UK's tax-havens.

"Sod the lot of you suckers, who are also our valued customers - Capital is on strike. We've got it and you owe it; and we'd rather have a major war, total chaos or revolution than invest it back in OECD countries - from where we've siphoned the money for the past 30 years!"

27th May 2013 - With the required approval of British Prime Minister David Cameron, top civil servant Dave Hartnett, disgraced head of the UK's tax collecting agency HMRC, has spun rapidly through the revolving door from a lifetime in government, latterly failing to collect the taxes due from industry and big business, and landed in the luxurious lap of Deloitte. Deloitte are one of the Big-4, accountants, tax-planners and auditors. They concoct and recommend the tax-efficient schemes and then go in and audit the books of the same major companies - and - guess what? They find the companies comply with all the laws - all over the World. "It is all perfectly legal". What an amazing coincidence.

This appointment stinks. It reeks of high level conspiracy.
1) Head of HMRC - top civil servant, DH.
2) Major international companies - tax billions disputed.
3) Major international auditors and tax-planners Big 4.
4) DH bypasses the rules and shakes hands on tax deals.
5) Disgraced DH resigns /takes early retirement.
6) DH given high paid commercial posts including joining the auditors and planners of one of largest tax discounts ever given.
7) David Cameron approves the revolving door post:- Prime Minister Cameron's wealth descends from his father's partnership at Panmure Gordon - and from later extensive tax-haven family funds.

Or - do we owe these loyal gentlemen an apology*

"Wikipedia - Leaving his full-time role as a City stockbroker, Ian Cameron (David Cameron's dad) went on to act as chairman of Close International Asset management, a multimillion-pound investment fund based in Jersey; as a senior director of Blairmore Holdings Inc, registered in Panama City and currently worth £25m; and he was also a shareholder in Blairmore Asset Management based in Geneva.
However, the family will – a public document seen by the Guardian – only details the assets of Ian Cameron's estate in England and Wales. Offshore investments would only be listed in submissions to HMRC for inheritance tax purposes. It is unclear what those assets – if any – are worth and which family member owns them."  

This government approved hiring, kicks sand in the faces of all the under-resourced agencies trying to reduce global tax-evasion and repatriate the $21 trillion to $32 trillion hidden in tax-havens. It is a powerful message to the world's crooks that London was, is and intends to remain the largest money laundering, tax-evasion haven, ever - whatever the consequences.

Bring us your drug cartels, your bent double bookkeeping, your blood diamonds, your gangsters, crooked dictators, arms dealers, criminals, dodgy directors, bonus gouging executives, evasive dentists and all other spivs. If you have money - you must be virtuous and blessed. We welcome all those who cheat their own nations, their own communities, who are traitors to their fellows, colleagues and neighbours; who are parasites feeding on ordered society with all of its advantages for trade and commerce - advantages bought with hard earned tax-dollars. Leeches, tape worms and sociopaths are all welcome to tax-free London.

There are only two possible sane responses to these insane machinations:

1) All good taxpayers withhold tax, until all due taxes are collected from the evaders. If you think you have a taxable income - just send yourself a "perfectly legal" transfer pricing invoice or a gobbledygook transfer document from a tax-haven and the taxable income dissolves - NO MORE TAX - All fully approved by your local friendly tax officers and embedded tax efficient "sleeper" judges in our Courts - NB retrospective bribes and sinecures accepted.

2) All OECD governments confiscate and repatriate the offshore funds - and tax them. Send in the gun-boats.

or 3) bankrupt OECD nations and global chaos.

TAX AND ECONOMICS ARTICLES 29TH APR 13
* 30 May 2013 - AN APOLOGY MAY BE DUE: A reader points out that Dave (Sweetheart) Hartnett might be a continuing, loyal, diligent and clever civil servant, still working for the UK. With the cunning connivance of his Prime Minister, it is possible Dave has been inserted into Deloitte and is, as we speak, copying their Vodafone tax-plans and audit files - and the files of other large and small complex groups who are Deloitte clients - and is passing the data to the HMRC Investigation Squad. Hartnett could be a fifth-columnist, a double-agent, whose cover required him to first make major, public sweetheart deals with taxpayers. This theory makes a lot of sense - as part of the UK's battle to recover its full share of offshore assets, as the USA aggressively tackles its tax-haven criminals and repatriation of trillions of dollars. And that of course is why he has the Prime Minister's full approval. If so, we apologize for suspecting the worst. After he has transferred the evidence for prosecution and quit his private sector posts then surely at least a knighthood will follow. Arise Sir Dave the Virtuous and Valorous, Bane of Tax-Evaders! 

Thursday, 23 May 2013

THE FUTURE - NO TAX OR MONEY

I really don't like to brag - anymore than do most other human beings - but as a "distinguished futurist" looking at the far future, I rarely get an opportunity, or expect to live long enough, to see the quantum wave forms of my forecasts collapse into tangible reality. But now, ...such a far fetched forecast has already proved correct. The mighty Apple Corporation has actualized and crystallized my prophecy, written for the European Commission and Bank Dresdner in 1999, that by 2012 companies would establish tax-havens on Earth satellites, baffling all the World's tax authorities. Dah! dah!

In fact Apple has gone further. It has structured its multifarious group companies and their millions of  quantum transactions, many via internet satellites, in such a futuristic way as to have no location, no residence, no presence ...for tax purposes, anywhere on Earth or in near Earth orbit. And they have baffled the tax collectors. In 1999 such electronic chicanery was unimaginable - but my paper correctly predicted it. The article also predicted many other internet related realities and developments that have come to pass. I will boast no more - check it out.

For personal, societal or business reasons, it pays to get a good sense of what is coming next and to plan accordingly. 
THE NEAR FUTURE

The near future is becoming increasingly chaotic and likely to be dominated by primitive reactionaries, evolving electronics and climate change. Nature is stirring the weather and increasing sea levels. Viruses and bacteria have evolved to beat our best antibiotics; plague threatens once again. See how these forces might impact the whole human race, quite soon, in the dramatic novel Out of the Depths.

Once person-kind gets its act together; learns to cooperate intelligently and to fully embrace the electronic revolution - the World will be a better place. It might take, is likely to take some time to mature. So I have set my optimistic forecasts in a Utopian and lighthearted novel some way into the future - AD2516 After Global Warming. 

THE FAR FUTURE
Underlying the very readable story you will find scientific advances, space travel and societal advances that can be taken seriously. In this future world there is no money - and so no taxes. Most goods are "printed" on demand (didn't someone just print a gun). People live for 180 years in perfect health. Everyone has an embedded bio-computer. One of our heroes, Sebastian, falls in love with "the most beautiful woman in the universe". Read it now to get ahead of the game. Buy it now while stocks last - to avoid disappointment.

And do try to live long enough to see if these prophecies come true.



Here is how the current Information Society, The Internet, The Electronic Revolution, Referendum Government - will develop.  

Wednesday, 22 May 2013

APPLE'S OFF-PLANET TAX-HAVEN


22nd May 2013. Email to journalist Simon Jenkins about cyberspace tax-evasion.

My Credentials - Short CV

Dear Simon Jenkins


My tax and cyberspace credentials include 30 years of giving tax advice, once specialising in back-duty-cases, and a forecast in 1999 for Bank Dresdner under the auspices of the EC in which I predicted that by 2012 some companies would use satellite based “off-planet” tax-havens (see Slide 9 in attached PDF). Apple etc have gone further, evolved to a higher ethereal form and vanished into The Cloud – with, they fondly hope all our money for all time. I am a poacher turned concerned grandfather. Here are two immediate solutions.

The target for repatriation is not only the billions in taxes but also the trillions in tax-evasion-capital-flight, variously calculated as from $18.5 to $32 trillion (80 million jobs for 10 years) off-shore. As your colleague Larry Elliott writes today “Tax lost offshore ‘could end world poverty’.  Capital has gone offshore and is on-strike.

(A) HMRC, IRS and other agencies could, under existing national tax laws, which assume guilt until proven innocent, legally raise protective assessments and penalties, as they would on you and me, on all the offshore assets, and prosecute back-duty-cases. I am professionally certain that critical scrutiny of the
ESCAPE FROM CYBERSPACE INTO HYPERSPACE
OFF-PLANET TAX-HAVENS
imaginative documents that siphon off the assets will reveal the deduction transactions are not tax-relievable in the USA /UK /OECD because they breach one of the 4 requirements: COMMERCIAL, ARMS-LENGTH, NECESSARY, NOT TAX-AVOIDANCE. Such assessments can legally be reopened back as far as HMRC and IRS want – say, 30 years. Professionally, my next futurist forecast, I also think numbers of executives and advisors will be prosecuted for making up the dodgy documents and signing incorrect tax-returns and balance-sheets – false accounting. A few prison sentences might curb their astonishing hubris.

However – back-duty-tax-cases are like the Minotaur’s Maze, with monstrous slavering lawyers lurking round every corner. It could take years of tedium. So go to Plan B:

(B) The CYPRUS solution. Simply confiscate the offshore assets, raise the protective assessments and wait for the tax-evaders to prove all taxes have been paid – for the past 30 years. The intelligence services, whistle-blowers and investigative journalists know where the assets are buried – and major nations have enough gun-boat power to repatriate them – using a crude accounts formula to share out the loot – based on Sales in their tax-regions in each of the past 30 years.

Andrew Smith, my MP, is asking Treasury Minister, David Gauke “Who in government use tax-havens?” Government is stuffed full with Big-4 etc tax-planners in influential offices - with a major stake in claiming their schemes were legal. 

I want to see all the money repatriated and intelligently invested so that my grandchildren will have bright futures. I am now a grandfather turned gamekeeper.

Do pass this e-note to OECD, US and UK politicians and government officers.

With regards

Noel Hodson

Monday, 20 May 2013

BATTLE FOR LIFE


Published on 6 May 2013
Pete has finally released his book about his fight with his deadly stroke which left him locked in. This book was written in his own words as it happened about how he fought his way back to live another day. 


As a soldier, Peter Coghlan faced bombs, bullying, murderous mobs and Hodgkins Lymphoma, the aggressive cancer which ended his military career. 
HEROIC FIGHT-BACK
FROM PARALYSIS
NEVER SAY DIE

 But after moving to Perth, Australia with Jade, the love of his life, there was no time to dwell on the past as Peter enjoyed a pre-dinner drink on the patio with friends and family. The future on that hot, sunny evening seemed as bright as the weather until, suddenly and shockingly, his dreams were shattered by a massive brain stem stroke. 

A frantic dash to hospital and emergency surgery rushed by in a blur and it was only when Peter awoke from a coma that he realised the awful truth. The stroke had left him virtually paralysed, imprisoned in his own body. At least he could blink. Using an alphabet board to communicate, he spelled out his determination to get back everything he’d lost. This true life account of one man’s fight against Locked-In Syndrome (LIS) is in turn heart-breaking, hilarious, harrowing and occasionally shocking. Yet, thanks to Peter's amazing courage, In the Blink of an Eye is never less than inspirational as he faces his greatest battle of all.



THE LIGHT FANTASTIC – 20 MAY 2013


I badly need light beams /light waves /photons to have rest-mass. Which all of respected and accepted science denies.


Maybe the conundrum is in the way we express ourselves. Since rejecting The Aether around 1900, science has determinedly talked of “empty-space” /the void /the space-time vacuum and made fabulously correct calculations on that assumption. But space is not empty. There is nowhere, no location large or small, in this or any other imagined universe that is not criss-crossed, cross-hatched with ever changing, legible electro-magnetic light radio waves. Every possible sphere, large or small, seethes with data-carrying, energetic, stable, permanent, visible and legible signals, broadcast by every phenomenon, large or small, from single electrons to brain-waves to colliding galaxies. It is these signals that enable us via our instruments to see the universe. I think these waves and photons have energy /mass and create the dynamic structures that create dynamic inertia. I think the Victorians were not wrong; I now call it The Aether-Matrix.

COMING SOON - SUNJAMMER 2014
NASA'S SOLAR SAIL DRIVEN BY SUNLIGHT.
If "weightless" photons are the primary particles - they are not massless – they must have rest-mass.  Many articles state that gravity has no effect on photons /Wavicles – but the famous observation of a solar eclipse, to prove Einstein’s theories, was of light from distant stars being curved by the gravity of the sun. Was that solar gravity tugging light beams or were they merely massless photons travelling through “curved space-time”?

But, the “weight” of sunlight has been demonstrated: (e.g. The difference between Lebedev's contraption, called a Nichols Radiometer, and the failed Crookes' set up was Lebedev's panels twisted on their string even in a complete vacuum. When the other contraption was totally evacuated of air, the paddles stopped. In the absence of any other force on the paddles (including heat), Lebedev finally proved that it was light pushing the paddles around.)

Four years ago while attending physics classes, I thought I read on the internet (and made notes of it) that Mathematician Mitchell Figenbaum ascribed a rest mass to the photon of 10E-49 grams. I cannot now find the article I read – nor any mention of 10E-49 grams. Contrariwise, internet searches now tell me, a thousand times over, that photons have no rest mass. I might even start to believe it.

The solar wind does however have weight, often referred to as the pressure of sunlight. This “wind” that streams the tails of meteors and comets away from the sun does contain particles other than “massless” photons, such as neutrinos – and presumably hydrogen and helium atoms expelled from the sun. But it is mostly photons. NASA has announced the “2014 Sunjammer mission which will deploy a sail that measures approximately 38 metres along one side with a total surface area of around 1,200 square metres, or a third of an acre. That's seven times larger than any solar sail tested in space to date.”

Citing, yet again, E=MC2 each gram of photons must compress or empty or attract energy from the ever Hubble expanding, basic, all pervasive electromagnetic field; in today's values (2013) clearing a volume of a sphere in “empty” space with a diameter of 500,000,000 meters or 500,000 kilometres (575,805,138.9118680 meters) and compacting the light to make a rest mass of 1 gram. 

1 gram of photons at my imaginary rest mass represents ten-thousand-billion-billion-billion-billion photons. So a single photon needs to collect the energy from a sphere of 6E-38 metres diameter; at current 2013 values (as my universe is dynamic not static and changes with time) of the energy that "empty" space contains. That is a surprisingly small sphere – so I wonder if my arithmetic is awry?

The essential search here is for the mechanism that turns pure energy into matter – and confers a reliable life span on the matter and the things it builds – say three-score-years-and-ten on a not totally repellent, complex walking sack of saline solution, such as me, for example. We are searching for the magic that converts ephemeral, insubstantial straw into solid, long lasting gold.  Every subatomic action in every passing micro-second in every one of my 100 trillion cells – and all of the cells’ interchanges and co-operations – and the signature signals from the whole (person) broadcasts into the field of the Aether-Matrix and thus informs and reforms the energy field.
If a photon is the product of intersecting light/ radio waves at a place or focus that compacts energy from the surrounding field, such entities subsist everywhere.  Each photon draws and holds the energy of a measurable sphere which logically must for a time contain less free-energy – the existence of a photon attenuates the space around it – it exists in a partial vacuum. I envisage the particle as a spinning vortex, a whirlwind, winding in the light field, creating a surface, with compression within and relative vacuum without.  The relative vacuums “attract” and the spinning surfaces “repel” – creating dynamic inertia.

The orientations of such transitional phenomena, as they combine, may account for magnetic dipoles and monopoles.

Light does not “travel”. Light does not “speed”. Light propagates. The energetic event we observe as light is an event that passes energy from light wave to light wave – at 300,000 KPS which is (so far) a basic quantum of our universe. This is the medium that propagates light, in wave formations that we do intuitively understand (because we are made from this stuff) and see in water, gases and all materials – even in rock. As the energy travels or spherically broadcasts it stimulates in-situ photons that we can then see – whatever the carrier wavelength. Thus the photons, in spheres surrounding an energetic event, might appear to be travelling faster than C 300,000 kilometres per second.

As the spinning entities we name as photons combine, they make other particles, a myriad of particles to which we ascribe a myriad of new names and properties. And the photons disappear into the transformation.

That’s it for now; I have written down part of what was in my head – until I realise how wrong this article is and revisit to correct it.



Massless particles [edit]

Massless particles have zero rest mass. Their relativistic mass is simply their relativistic energy, divided by c2, or m(relativistic) = E/c2.[25][26] The energy for photons is E = hfwhere h is Planck's constant and f is the photon frequency. This frequency and thus the relativistic energy are frame-dependent.
If an observer runs away from a photon in the direction it travels from a source, having it catch up with the observer, then when the photon catches up it will be seen as having less energy than it had at the source. The faster the observer is traveling with regard to the source when the photon catches up, the less energy the photon will have. As an observer approaches the speed of light with regard to the source, the photon looks redder and redder, by relativistic Doppler effect (the Doppler shift is the relativistic formula), and the energy of a very long-wavelength photon approaches zero. This is why a photon is massless; this means that the rest mass of a photon is zero.

Massless particles contribute rest mass and invariant mass to systems [edit]

Two photons moving in different directions cannot both be made to have arbitrarily small total energy by changing frames, or by moving toward or away from them. The reason is that in a two-photon system, the energy of one photon is decreased by chasing after it, but the energy of the other will increase with the same shift in observer motion. Two photons not moving in the same direction will exhibit an inertial frame where the combined energy is smallest, but not zero. This is called the center of mass frame or the center of momentumframe; these terms are almost synonyms (the center of mass frame is the special case of a center of momentum frame where the center of mass is put at the origin). The most that chasing a pair of photons can accomplish to decrease their energy is to put the observer in frame where the photons have equal energy and are moving directly away from each other. In this frame, the observer is now moving in the same direction and speed as the center of mass of the two photons. The total momentum of the photons is now zero, since their momentums are equal and opposite. In this frame the two photons, as a system, have a mass equal to their total energy divided by c2. This mass is called the invariant massof the pair of photons together. It is the smallest mass and energy the system may be seen to have, by any observer. It is only the invariant mass of a two-photon system that can be used to make a single particle with the same rest mass.
Since sunlight has energy, it also has a mass associated with it as indicated by Einstein's famous equation E = mc^2 or m = E/(c^2). 


An elementary textbook says the sun converts 4.2 x 10^9 kg of mass to energy every second. Using this number, we can estimate the amount of energy (mass) from the sun hitting the earth by calculating the fraction of the entire solid angle the earth intercepts as seen by the sun. Since the diameter of the earth is about 1.3 x 10^7 m and it is 1.5 x 10^11 m from the sun, it subtends an angle of about 8.7 x 10^-5 radians. If we square this angle and divide by 4 pi = 12.6, we get the solid angle fraction subtended by the earth, which I calculate to be about 6 x 10^-10 of the entire solid angle. Multiplying this by the 4.2 x 10^9 kg burned by the sun every second and we obtain 2.5 kg/s as the mass of the photons (light) from the sun striking the earth every second. 


There is another way to guesstimate this number using the rough estimate of 1 kW/m^2 as the energy of the sunlight striking the earth. Multiplying this by the area of a disk with the area of the cross section of the earth (pi x R^2 = 1.3 x 10^14 m^2) gives 1.3 x 10^17 J/s. Dividing this by the velocity of light squared (c^2 = 9 x 10^16) gives 1.4 kg/s. I consider this to be in excellent agreement with the figure of 2.5 kg/s obtained above. 

Please let me know if you find this less than clear or would like more information or explanation.
 

Best, Dick Plano, Professor of Physics emeritus, Rutgers University 

Saturday, 18 May 2013

BENT BOOKKEEPERS BEWARE


REPATRIATE TAX-EVASION-CAPITAL-FLIGHT
TO SAVE THE WORLD'S ECONOMY.
OUR GRANDCHILDREN NEED JOBS!
TAX-EVADERS ACROSS THE WORLD ARE BELTING OUT THE MESSAGE THAT "NEW INTERNATIONAL LAWS ARE REQUIRED TO CURB AVOIDANCE"

Oh no they are not! We don't need new laws.

The bent bookkeepers are now desperate to impress on OECD tax collectors that the avoiders and evaders have always acted within the rules; and have acted legally in creating risible transactions to gouge OECD profits and capital to tiny islands, mountain fortresses and dodgy regimes. All the Balance Sheets and Tax Returns they have prepared or signed as True and Honest records, over the past 30 years, are therefore legal - they aver.

The law needs changing - they say. But it is not so. False Accounting, making things up; fabricating transactions, has been well defined criminal behaviour for over a hundred years, or more. Such rules are being applied, now, in all OECD countries to perpetrators of "ordinary" tax-back-duty-cases and tax-investigations. If the international posh criminals are to be judged innocent, within the law as it has been written to date - then all past cases can be overturned - all the accused are innocent - and any taxes, penalties and costs must be returned to them. Al Capone - jailed for keeping two sets of books - must be exonerated and his family compensated.

Surely the offshore tax-evaders are not saying there is one law for the poor and no law for the rich?

UK major public companies recently publicly protested that their hundreds of tax-haven companies are NOT used to avoid or evade tax. Most of us no longer believe in fairies. This was my letter to the media:

• Presumably the FTSE 100 groups who do not use their tax-haven subsidiaries for avoidance or evasion will, as public companies, publish the fine details of the transactions. (Top firms condemned for prolific use of tax havens, 13 May). To legally reduce UK or OECD taxable profits, the deductions must be (1) commercial terms; (2) arm's-length; (3) commercially necessary (4) not tax-dodges – otherwise HMRC can retrospectively deny decades of claims. I estimate that of the global $21tn of tax-evasion-capital-flight, more than $2tn (five million jobs for 10 years) has been illicitly siphoned from the UK. HMRC must repatriate it.
Noel Hodson
Oxford

 


The elaborate and artificial structures used by Starbucks and other multinational groups do not only save them tax (You do evil, MPs tell Google, 17 May) – they also give them a built-in competitive advantage, because the same dodges are not available to domestic competitors in the markets in which they make their money (such as the UK). So why not hit them using not tax law but the Competition Act? The companies in such groups are ostensibly trading at arm's length – otherwise HMRC would disallow the charges which divert profits to the chosen tax-shelter. But there are also clearly concerted practices which have the effect of distorting competition. Should not the Office of Fair Trading be taking action using the remedies available to it to nullify this unfair benefit?
Tony Ridge
York


• Presumably the FTSE 100 groups who do not use their tax-haven subsidiaries for avoidance or evasion will, as public companies, publish the fine details of the transactions. (Top firms condemned for prolific use of tax havens, 13 May). To legally reduce UK or OECD taxable profits, the deductions must be (1) commercial terms; (2) arm's-length; (3) commercially necessary (4) not tax-dodges – otherwise HMRC can retrospectively deny decades of claims. I estimate that of the global $21tn of tax-evasion-capital-flight, more than $2tn (five million jobs for 10 years) has been illicitly siphoned from the UK. HMRC must repatriate it.
Noel Hodson
Oxford


• The role of accountants and advisers is to legally find the best ways to understand and use the tax regime to the best interest of their client (100 of UK's richest people concealing billions in offshore tax havens, 10 May). To agree with Jennie Granger at HMRC, most accountants will be acting legitimately and there should be nothing to fear. A "crackdown" on tax evasion is however necessary and this leaked data provides the perfect opportunity for David Cameron to show the public that he's serious – turning his words into action ahead of the G8 summit.
Adam Harper
Association of Accounting Technicians


• My blood boiled reading about Amazon receiving more grants than the corporation tax they paid. What is this government playing at? My business partner and I set up Firebrand 12 years ago and tried to get funding from regional development agencies. We drew a blank. So we funded the business ourselves. We now employ 50 people in the UK and have offices in Denmark, Sweden, Holland and Germany employing another 50. All of it without a penny from any UK government or the EU. We've always paid our taxes – we've never offshored our activities to avoid tax, although we could have. We invest in the UK and EU with no incentives or support from the state. Good old Amazon, making millions from the UK taxpayer and getting more back from the government than they pay in tax. What a strange world we live in. Some of us struggle to do the right thing for the good of the country and our long-term futures.
Robert Chapman
Firebrand Training, London


• Couldn't the EU agree a uniform rate of corporation tax to be levied by all of its members – including their overseas dependencies? Sorry, Ukip.
Keith Potter
Gunnislake, Cornwall


• Amazon exemplifies the Thatcher dictum of "no such thing as society". Their behaviour is not only contributing to the parlous state of our welfare and NHS but is also destroying small businesses. I predict the party that can propose a workable solution to this problem will win the next election.
Stephen J Decker
Chelmsford, Essex


• I'm furious Simon Jenkins should so casually deploy that loaded pejorative "strident" to Margaret Hodge, chair of the public accounts committee (Comment, 17 May). She is not strident: she is determined, forthright and intelligent. More to the point, she is an effective champion of the people inside parliament – and we have damned few of those these days.
Catherine Rose
Olney, Buckinghamshire


TAX AND ECONOMICS ARTICLES 29TH APR 13