By David Sims
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The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the sounds of First CoffeeSM’s kids doing their homeschool work and the questions they have as Mrs. First CoffeeSM’s at the refugee center – working, not applying:
Happy birthday, Shirley Jackson, author of the 1948 story “The Lottery,” one of the creepiest, scariest, most chilling short stories ever. It’s been copied innumerable times but never equaled in its simple brutal terror – Stephen King alone has written at least two entire novels which read like write-outs of “The Lottery.”
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The NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency (NC3A to you and me) has awarded Savi Technology a new contract to upgrade and sustain operational support of the RFID-based network Savi built last year to track multi-national defense consignments between Europe and Afghanistan.
The contract followed a year-long assessment of the RFID “backbone” Savi deployed for NATO, and calls for purchase of additional active, data-rich Radio Frequency Identification tags and readers as well as network wide software enhancements to the International Security Assistance Force supply chain, stretching from the Netherlands and Germany through Uzbekistan to Kabul, Afghanistan.
The upgrades include installation of the Savi SmartChain Consignment Management Solution, which will enable NATO to maintain nearly real-time supply chain management and visibility, and will provide an interoperable solution for member nations to share information on both national and joint multi-national consignments.
Savi’s RFID-based network was found to meet NATO’s Standardisation Agreement for ‘best commercial practice” requirements for asset and consignment tracking and were approved by all 26 member nations.
26 nations. And you think you have a cumbersome purchase approval process at your company.
Bruce Jacquemard, Savi’s Executive VP of Worldwide Sales said the ability of interoperable RFID-based networks to link with each other when appropriate “enhances in-transit visibility of supplies and ultimately provides greater confidence to the war fighter needing the right material in the right place at the right time.”
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The Irish Times reports today that Google will create about 650 jobs in Dublin, “more than doubling its Irish workforce as it steps up expansion in Europe.”
Angus Kelsell, Google’s European finance director told the Times that the Irish expansion “which will take place over two to three years, is not tax-related… it is to do with supporting our European business.”
Google’s European headquarters in Barrow Street, Dublin, are the company’s largest operation outside the US, and due to its Irish operation, the Times says, California-based Google has “significantly lowered” its tax bill for the first nine months of 2005, according to documents lodged with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the U.S.
No doubt what Google says is right, and they’re probably not even cognizant of the fact that their effective tax rate fell to 31 per cent from 39 per cent, saving somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million a year because more of its earnings came from its Irish unit in 2005 than in 2004, taxed at the Irish rate of 12.5 per cent instead of the US rate of 35 per cent, according to the Times.
Globalization at its finest. Countries with confiscatory tax rates are going to see those companies which can move to countries which steal less of the wealth they create. You say Ireland’s losing money by taxing Google at a lower rate?