Be Excellent To Each Other

Co house fees are fuck all. But as a company you have to prepare accounts, and as a small self employed window cleaner you don't as you can report everything direct on your tax return which anyone can do. You don't stand a chance of doing that successfully without getting an accountant, and Co House now rigourously reject any that aren't right, and if they reject them after the filing date, you get a penalty which is high.

You also have two tax returns as you are a director so you don't get out of your personal return, plus one for the company. You can get away with doing the company tax return yourself, but if you aren't represented, your chances of enquiry are much, much higher. Your chances of winning any enquiry, even where you weren't wrong, are much, much lower.

Also, iirc, John Lewis pays Corp Tax too, so your comparison is flawed.

Accountancy fees? You'd do it yourself, surely? It'd be short form accounts anyway for that sort of sized company (unless you're making millions and being coy about it ). And general admin, you'd have that anyway, surely? And don't get me started on people who put a value to their own time - it's like people who write complaint letters to Argos and say "I shall be charging you £100 an hour for my time in resolving my complaint" in green ink.


I'm not a corporate lawyer any more but I recall that it's fairly difficult to prosecute a director for pretty much anything to do with the running of the company other than fraud or trading whilst insolvent.

Ah, fair enough - but those are potential costs rather than actual. If you're not a moron you should be fine, surely?


Not even remotely flawed - my point being that it's not run for investors' benefits, so the "poor rate of return" you get due to increased corp tax means precisely fuck all.

Ok, this article reads like a piece of buck-passing spin, but what caught my eye was this



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... lence.html

Just as well they weren't lame gags on Twitter, eh folks?

The should have run more data mining, using protocols!

/24 mode

"Don't be a knob" seems to pretty much cover it.

I feel the need to reply to Cavey's posts about the arts being pointless.

I'm not sure you understand how the world works mate. You can't draw a solid line between art and engineering. As an engineer yourself you must, *must* understand that elegance and grace is in everything. You must know that engineering and design are the same thing. The greatest engineers are great artists. You see what I'm getting at here?

One compliments the other. We need poncing preening fops every bit as much as we need monkey armed grease monkeys. Not least because that's what some people will be anyway. I liked Squirt's comment about shoving a wrench in Crispin's hands: some people will never be 'useful' in practical ways. BUT! Those people are the men and women that create the TV programs and radio shows and music that you no doubt enjoy. These people helped drag the country from it's coal dust encrusted past into a modern world with innovative design and creativity. You may not like them, but you need them.

And, guess what? They need education too. Apprenticeships even. A youngster with a spark of talent is massively benefited by being taught by an experienced practitioner. Universities are an ideal place for these people to grow into their field and hone their technique and build networks so they too can start a business and BENEFIT THE FUCKING ECONOMY.

Or a monorail.

I don't think he's slamming the arts. More slamming things like "golf course management" and "lady gaga studies" and "david beckham studies" which serve no real importance in the scheme of things.

Absolute fucking drivel.

They're not prosecutable though, are they? But the shareholders can enforce against the directors? Which if you're the shareholder is a bit of a non-issue.

I wonder what Avatar would have looked like if none of the CGI people could draw or understood art at all.

No, read back through his posts, mate - he's also saying he'd sacrifice history and english literature.

I'd sacrifice them too.

Heh. BUT! The DoP had to understand light and shade and colour and other arty things that you don't get from learning to use a spanner.

You've fucked off overseas so you lose any opinion on what happens here. Bloody expats.

I just wrote a calculations post proving Mr K wrong, but it bored even me, and this isn't the thread for it anyway. Anyhow, the numbers show that John Lewis employees get virtually the same amount post tax as vodafone shareholders do per £100 of profit. So ner.

Something interesting I found: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11438140

In the UK we spend 1.3% of our GDP on higher education, of which (I'm guessing) is mostly publically funded as until now our fees charged to students haven't been very high. About 35% of kids get degrees.

In the US, they spend 3.1% of GDP, but only 1/3rd of it comes from the public purse -- the rest is fees and donations to Universities. About 37% of their kids get degrees.

But in Finland, they spend 1.6% of GDP, with 94% of all higher education funding from public money. Students pay no fees at all. 63% of kids get degrees.

How the hell are the Fins so much more efficient than we are, and how are the Americans so goddamn wasteful? And why are we choosing to move towards the US and not towards the Fins?

You appear to have quoted the wrong post - I pretty much agree with the point that art is important (but it would probably survive a year or two off), but compared to practical stuff, it's pushing close to worthless.
Without artists, Avatar probably would have looked crap. Without engineers, there would have been no computers to draw it on, no stages to act it, no cameras to film it with and no theatres to watch it in.

From somewhere else:

I'd take a stab at that having more to do with the people doing the learning than the money involved.

This is a fatuous argument. Without artists to storyboard and authors to write screenplays, you don't have something that looks crap, you have a load of software guys sat around with an expensive render cluster doing nothing at all. Filmmaking, as an overall process, is a craft that relies on both artistic and technical aspects. If you don't have both bits, you don't have films.

Ha! I'll take your word for it.

Still, they could always charge higher prices.



So we need both, then? As without artists, writers, cameramen, directors and actors we wouldn't have a film industry which keeps all those engineers in business. And the arty sorts could always just fuck off back to the theatre and put the lot of them out of work.

Also there's "useless" economically, and "useless" culturally. Culture is as important as cash, IMHO OHO ETC.

I'm interested in what you mean here.

[quote="Mr Kissyfur"
They're not prosecutable though, are they? But the shareholders can enforce against the directors? Which if you're the shareholder is a bit of a non-issue.[/quote]

Could a third party not hold a Director personally liable in the event that he did not do stuff properly? CA doesn't appear to be too clear.

*Grumbles about art and design being not even remotely the same thing*

There's this great book you should read, it's called 1984.

Could a third party not hold a Director personally liable in the event that he did not do stuff properly? CA doesn't appear to be too clear.
[/quote]
The fiduciary duty bit is important here - it's not something that third parties can rely on. And note 174 is excluded even from that - IIRC 174 is a wishy washy statement of "wouldn't it be nice if companies were nice".

Turf wars aside, they're a teensy bit related though, aren't they?

Without artists, we wouldn't need computers.

We'd all be John Coffey, endlessly building a technological marvel, but never using it for anything other than benchmarks.

And my point, distilled to the minimum is 'Engineers are artists'

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I made that quite clear. (Hey, if you select something in the 'topic review' bit and hit 'quote' it only quotes the selected bit).


It's a guess, like I said, but maybe the Finnish culture leans more toward learning?

Some are, certainly. Brunel certainly was. Christopher Wren was. Sur Alan isn't.

Whilst I consider the arts important... to take a random sample such as this board, how many of your favourite musicians and authors studied English Lit or Music at University?

Jesus, there's at least three different conversations going on here


That's tricky to define - isn't anyone with any skill an artist?

Not really, no, but we'll start getting into philosophical arguments about what art really is if we go down this route.

I wanted to make that point about Crispin but (unsurprisingly) I don't know who he is

s174 is due care, skill and dillgence.

I really can't remember, to be honest. I've a feeling I should know, though.

Perhaps, but culture isn't some fixed thing that you just have to deal with. It's something you can endeavour to change through policy.

Oops.

It is if you listen to Mr Chris

Utter drivel.

That's two people trying to carve a nice solid niche out for themselves without seeing the interconnectedness of it all. You have to be an artist to be a designer. I trained in design, but have no artistic flair so I ultimately failed. Look are Zardoz! He's an artist! Admittedly I haven't seen any of your work, but I doubt it's just black text on white backgrounds.

<Kalmar>
C'mon people. We are everybody!
</Kalmar>

Edit: Slow typing today

I'm not touching this one

Possibly, but why is it they can do it more cheaply? I'm with Gaywood - I can't see how a massive, research heavy country like the US can end up spending so much public money on something that is largely privately funded.



Hell, fine with me! I'm always intersted in learning, as this is an area I don't really know that much about. From an ignorant point of view, I'd have thought design involves many of the same creative processes as art, but the difference is the purpose and the requirement to take into account function?

Eh? Culture is just there, but of course it's something you can wreck or improve through policy.

Rubbish. Rubbish rubbish rubbish.

I'm not an artist. I'm a pixel engineer.

Why?

How about this one?
*glances at banana hammock*

I've seen it done before.
Company was running out of cash - director/shareholder kept taking dividends out. When the company went bust, creditors went after him personally under s174 (or 85 equivalent) and he lost his house. Liquidators can look back at actions over a two year period prior to insolvency iirc.

Trust me when I say that creating a customer mentality in further education won't help at all.

When I taught in Cardiff Uni in the early 00s, we struggled with students who needed a solid bollocking about poor attendence and not handing in assignments, but if we did all we got back was the attitude "I'm paying for this degree and I'll attend or not attend as I see fit". Ten years previously, we could have reported them to the grant-awarding LEA who could threaten to remove funding for layabouts (rare, but happened occasionally).

In theory this shouldn't be a problem but 18 year old students away from home for the first time are generally not adults; they need a kick up the arse sometimes to sort their priorities out. If universities are a business, they can't do that, and everyone loses -- including the students themselves.