[HN Gopher] Tax System in the Faroe Islands
___________________________________________________________________
Tax System in the Faroe Islands
Author : programLyrique
Score : 77 points
Date : 2023-01-08 11:34 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (prospect.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (prospect.org)
| cm_silva wrote:
| In Portugal, if you are an employee or pensioner and have no
| other sources of income, the tax form is filled in automatically
| for you. Just confirm if you want, and hit 'send'.
| pavlov wrote:
| This is the case in almost all European countries nowadays.
|
| The US tax and banking systems are so bad that it's genuinely
| hard to understand from the Euro perspective.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| US system is difficult by design. Automation would make
| filing less painful, and one party dislikes taxes so prefers
| people feel the pain.
| lokar wrote:
| The IRS could do a simple automatic return for the vast
| majority of Americans. Lobbying from intuit prevents it.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| While Intuit and their friends do lobby, the US tax code
| was fiendishly complex long before Intuit was even a
| thing.
|
| "The income tax has made more liars out of the American
| people than golf has. Even when you make a tax form out
| on the level, you don't know when it's through, if you
| are a crook or a martyr." -- Will Rogers
|
| Will Rogers died in 1935.
| lokar wrote:
| But the majority of Americans have only w2 income and no
| deductions
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Their taxes are easy, too. Just a handful of clicks
| through a free e-filing system. Most can also use a free
| in-person filing service (VITA.)
|
| Most of the thousands of hours you hear about comes from
| working through legitimate complexity (complicated
| assets, stock splits, self-employment, etc.)
|
| That's not to say it wouldn't be good to have more
| computing thrown at automating the rules for that
| complexity.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Right. Even a paper 1040EZ doesn't take more than a few
| minutes... probably even less online.
| ghaff wrote:
| The 1040EZ was eliminated I believe. But the same applies
| to the 1040 if you're just basically entering W2 info.
| ratg13 wrote:
| They already do your taxes for you. This is how they know
| if your returns are off or not.
|
| The only difference is that in the rest of the world,
| they show you the calculation the government came up with
| first.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > They already do your taxes for you.
|
| They have no way of knowing what all your business
| expenses are (especially ones that don't require sending
| the recipient one of the various Form 1099s). They can
| look at what you _claim_ as business expenses and
| retroactively require you to show proof of those expenses
| (i.e., audit you) if they seem unreasonable, but that 's
| an entirely different thing.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| In the UK, less than 10% of the population even file a tax
| return. For 90% of people tax is just taken at source. Unless
| you have a small business, rent out properties or work abroad,
| HMRC already knows what you needed to pay and get's it right
| 99% of the time and your employer/pension provider just
| withholds as required. It's always baffled me that so many rich
| countries don't operate like this...
| gpderetta wrote:
| I do my own taxes on the UK, it is not complicated, but it
| would be everything a billion time easier if all brokerage
| accounts [1]and banks had a simple way to get all
| transactions in a tax year in a single csv file instead if
| having to do a billion clicks and having to parse dozens of
| pdf files!
|
| Also can I have everything in a single unified gui?
|
| [1] especially those barebone accounts used for employee
| stock grants.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| That would be perfect. It would be so much better if they
| just sent you a form with a few numbers on. And the maths
| and format were the same irrespective of the firm. One from
| each of your brokers, add the numbers together, put onto
| tax return, submit and sleep soundly.
| nsteel wrote:
| They could send that journalist to almost any country and
| experience a better tax system than the US. Although it sounds
| like a nice trip and he got some hikes in.
|
| > Filing taxes takes up an estimated 6.5 billion hours each year
| --as the right-leaning Tax Foundation points out, the equivalent
| of 3.1 million people working full-time for the whole year.
|
| It's just a staggering level of waste. But hey, keep shuffling
| stuff around until that "obnoxious paperwork" is technically only
| one piece of paper (except for all the schedules you need to also
| include). It's beyond dumb. Sort yourselves out, America.
| BariumBlue wrote:
| Turbo tax and H&R Block, companies that produce software for
| filling taxes, lobby to keep taxes complex and non-easy (unless
| you pay for their software)
| beej71 wrote:
| This is why I still do taxes myself, including itemization
| and SE. Free fillable forms gets me e-file.
|
| If there's ever anything in unsure of, I hire an independent
| tax person to do it. Then if I have to do it again, I use
| that as a template.
|
| Another option is a lot of these places allow you to compute
| the results without paying, and you can use that to check
| your work.
|
| Overall, a royal pain in the ass, but at least those fuckers
| don't get a dime out of me.
| ausbah wrote:
| in most cases it's pointless for people to file their own
| taxes. governments already n ke their income streams and
| can tax appropriately at the source. just the idea of
| people having to do their own taxes represents those
| "fuckers" taking your time away
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| Well, the easy part of tax filing is easy: yes, it's a bit
| tedious in a sense that you have to copy some stuff from your
| W2 to 1040, but that's it.
|
| Calculating part time rental property depreciation is
| complicated, but that's because it IS complicated.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Exactly. The ordinary earned income portion of our income
| is 80% or more of our income and 1-2% of the tax filing
| burden/complexity.
| LikesPwsh wrote:
| The imbalance is that it's more like 2% of tax complexity
| but 80% (made up numbers) of time spent.
|
| Assuming no submission is equivalent to a submission with
| earned income only (standard in Europe) would save an
| incredible amount of time.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I think ordinary income is < 5% of the burden (not just
| complexity). Think about where the time is spent on your
| own return: it's not copying 10 numbers from your W-2 or
| counting your kids, but rather figuring your investment
| gains/losses, K-1s, Schedule C for your side work or app.
|
| People with only earned income already have a very easy
| time of it here as well.
| ghaff wrote:
| The W-2 case with maybe a 1099 and standard deduction is
| pretty simple. And should probably be even simpler by
| autofilling a "Here's what we think you owe/are owed"
| return. But you get into complex returns pretty quickly
| for the reasons you describe. I don't even have that
| complex a return and what I got from my accountant was
| probably a 1/2 inch thick last year.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| This isn't true. Lower income people are more likely to
| work more than one job simultaneously, or to do casual
| work or a string of jobs, or be 'contractors' than have a
| single W2 with accurate numbers. Only 20% of taxpayers
| who qualify for free direct filing use it - mostly
| because they don't even know it exists. Many Americans
| are challenged by even the process of completing the
| form.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I read theory a lot and I can see it as an argument that the
| filing process for Americans with reasonably simple
| situations are painful and difficult (ie that there's no
| government website[1] to file for free, or that the IRS can't
| fill in details for you). But I would think tax companies are
| not hugely important in the grand scheme of things and that
| the actual reason that tax is so complicated is more broad,
| eg:
|
| - many layers of taxation due to the political structure of
| the US - federal, state, city, county, maybe also
| school/water board?
|
| - lots of different deductions exist, and probably for any
| deduction there are politicians who want it to stay. Each
| individual deduction may be well meaning (or the result of
| fraught negotiations) but the whole is undesirably
| complicated and hard to fix. The rich also have an advantage
| in a more complicated system but AMT was created so
| presumably this advantage has limits.
|
| While the first point seems to somewhat naturally fall out of
| the US political system, I don't have a great explanation for
| why the second should apply in the US but not other
| countries? E.g the U.K. tax system has a few special cases
| (something to do with child care, some married couples
| things, some ability for farmers to carry losses forward,
| maybe some special rules for reverends or Lloyds
| underwriters?) but nowhere near as many as the US. I think
| both tax systems are quite old but maybe some U.K. government
| in the 20th century decided to simplify it a bunch? Certainly
| a bunch of old taxes like rates don't really exist for
| individuals anymore.
|
| [1] presumably the US government have been terrified of
| launching big websites since healthcare.gov too.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Most of the benefits listed, apart from the extremely simple tax
| code, exists in all modern countries country (here I use the
| tautological definition of "modern" as meaning somewhere where
| everyone has a bank account and "doing your taxes" is typically
| less cumbersome than accepting a cookie banner).
| AwaAwa wrote:
| Always useful when you can define 'modern' to preclude the
| major economies of america. Which is beside the point the
| article is making.
| digvalley wrote:
| Well,
|
| 1. the tax rate is high (50%)
|
| 2. resources (fish) is widely corrupt and just a few billioners
| reap the benefits (proportionally)
|
| 3. there are loopholes. Shippers who work for a faroe islands
| company, work abroad, has their residence in an other country pay
| 0% tax (something like that)
|
| 4. the tax code has not much less complexity than say norway.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Let's list out a partial list of major US tax problems:
|
| 1. As we all know, tax preparation is intentionally complicated
| and hard thanks to lobbying by the tax preparation industry;
|
| 2. Access to the financial system should be a right. This article
| correctly points out there are ~6 million "unbanked" individuals.
| I haven't actually seen this problem in other developed
| countries. People will quite literally take their paycheck and
| cash it;
|
| 3. Also noted here: decades of Republicans starving the IRS (and
| pretty much everything else the government does bar the military
| of course). This creates a cycle where a starved government is
| then used as an argument to further starve the government. It's
| not surprising the Republicans are so incensed at last year's
| bill to fund the IRS and paint it as armed IRS officers coming
| and seizing your mobile home to try and rally support for it.
| It's the same reason the 15% minimum corporate tax was opposed
| even though the nominal corporate tax rate is 21%: to benefit the
| ultra-wealthy and corporations;
|
| 4. Deductions. Honestly pretty much everything should be gotten
| rid of for personal income other than _maybe_ retirement saving.
| But there are simply way too many vested interests here for this
| to ever happen;
|
| 5. We need to annually tax unrealized capital gains;
|
| 6. Stop double taxing dividends. This leads to a lot of
| unnecessary complexity (eg passthrough corporation tax benefits).
| Dividend tax imputation is not hard;
|
| 7. Tax trusts as we do estates;
|
| 8. Tax land use based on assessed value, particularly for single-
| family houses. A $1 million house should pay higher property tax
| than a $1 million apartment.
|
| The US really is a dystopian hellscape.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| >As we all know, tax preparation is intentionally complicated
| and hard thanks to lobbying by the tax preparation industry;
|
| That ignores the lobbying by other industries for their
| favorite loopholes: mortgage interest, like kind exchanges,
| carried interest, R&D credits, and so on. Much of the
| complexity in the tax code is actually to close the loopholes
| that taxpayers are always finding, which has nothing to do with
| the tax prep industry.
|
| > Deductions. Honestly pretty much everything should be gotten
| rid of for personal income other than maybe retirement saving.
|
| This ignores the sizable impact of tax credits -- are you
| proposing those all eliminated also? Currently there is only a
| _deferral_ of tax on qualified retirement savings, except for
| Roth IRA earnings (not contributions). There should also be tax
| free /deferred savings allowed for health care, so that it is
| not tied only to employment.
|
| >We need to annually tax unrealized capital gains;
|
| Even on someone's primary residence or other personal-use
| property? How do you determine fair market value? And it would
| only make sense if paired with annual deduction of unrealized
| capital losses.
|
| >Tax trusts as we do estates;
|
| This makes little sense. For income tax, trusts and estates are
| already taxed essentially the same. If you are referring to the
| estate/gift tax, the assets in a trust after death already go
| through the estate tax regime, why would you do it twice?
| cs702 wrote:
| Without a doubt, the US tax system is broken in mumerous ways. To
| a close approximation, _everyone_ agrees on that.
|
| But the OP's notion makes about as much sense as asking if Amazon
| can somehow draw lessons for improving the efficiency and
| simplicity of its global software and hardware infrastructure by
| studying the super-simple software and hardware infrastructure of
| some tiny company. It strikes me as... highly unlikely.
|
| The economy of the Faroe Islands is both very, very small (annual
| GDP is 166x smaller than Amazon's annual revenues) and very, very
| simple (45% of exports are salmon fish), making it much easier to
| find a really simple system that works reasonably well for
| everyone. A quick comparison is instructive:
| Population GDP
| -------------------------------------- United States
| 333,287,000 $25,035.0B Faroe Islands 54,000
| $3.1B --------------------------------------
|
| That said, by all accounts the islands are incredibly beautiful
| and their people are remarkably nice.
| dr_petes wrote:
| I don't think bigger always needs to be more complex.
|
| For simplicity sake, a 10% tax on income would scale
| infinitely, no matter how big an economy grows (I'm not arguing
| in favor of this tax).
|
| But the point of the article, in my opinion, is that US has a
| large problem, costing tax payers an estimated 40 billion in
| labor figuring out their taxes, where other countries have
| almost automated the entire process.
|
| I think there is something to be learned from there, as most
| people would agree that the US tax system is a mess.
| cs702 wrote:
| > I don't think bigger always needs to be more complex.
|
| And yet, the bigger a software company gets, the more
| labyrinthine its systems get. Ask any software or IT engineer
| who was at, say, Amazon, Facebook, or Google, as the company
| grew from serving a few hundred thousand customers to
| hundreds of millions of customers.
|
| Similarly, the bigger a country is, the more labyrinthine its
| systems are (tax, legal, regulatory, etc.). Large distributed
| systems tend to become very complex, even though _no one_
| wants them to be. There are always many competing interests
| negotiating with each other and reaching compromises that no
| one likes.
| naasking wrote:
| > Ask any software or IT engineer who was at, say, Amazon,
| Facebook, or Google, as the company grew from serving a few
| hundred thousand customers to hundreds of millions of
| customers.
|
| It's not the number of customers so much as the number of
| diverse things they do. Ditto for a country's taxes. I
| expect the Faroe islands' industry is fairly limited
| compared to the US, so they may not need as many
| exemptions, tax credits, deductions, etc. No doubt there's
| still considerable room for streamlining though.
| sokoloff wrote:
| What percent of that $40B is relating to "taxes other than
| ordinary earned income" (the part that the Faroes have
| simplified)?
|
| I suspect it's very high 90s of percent.
| twawaaay wrote:
| If I was a government body responsible for setting tax rules
| after reading the article I still haven't learned anything.
|
| First of all, tax systems are typically result of huge forces
| within the country and represent history of negotiating between
| parties or other groups of people that each tries to get
| something for themselves while the government needs to deal with
| finite budget and groups of people dissatisfied that somebody
| else got something but not them.
|
| Second, Faroe Island is a tiny, tiny country. With any kind of
| organisation, as the organisation grows things get more and more
| complicated.
|
| And third, they point out Faroe Island has a huge GDP that comes
| from a fortunate resource. Countries that are in this position
| tend to have simpler tax systems because they do not need to rely
| on their citizens. Citizens rightly assume that if the country
| has a national resource they are entitled to have the resource
| pay for the infrastructure and government and not them. There is
| no need to fight to figure out where the money will come for this
| or that project -- the answer is always pretty much the same and
| it is not to put a levy on citizens but rather on the resource
| the country has.
| monkeycantype wrote:
| ...Australia looks on confused... what you're saying mass
| resource extractors should pay tax for that...
| messe wrote:
| > "When the year is over, almost everybody ends up with 'Oh, it's
| correct. I don't have to pay any more, and I don't get any money
| back,'" said Morkore. Continuous collection also eliminates the
| time risk of the government losing out on tax payments if
| companies go bankrupt before TAKS could cash their checks.
|
| Is this not normal in most of Europe? In Ireland, I've found it's
| usually only off by a few cent at most, which is then adjusted
| for in the next calendar year by automatically reducing tax
| credits appropriately.
| rmnwski wrote:
| In Germany it's a complicated bureaucratic mess and people
| often get can get a lot back but of course not always.
| jakub_jo wrote:
| Yeah I think so. Often time it's invalid if you have periods
| without a job. So you paid too much in advance. Then you get it
| back.
| dxs wrote:
| For several years now I've been wondering about a couple of
| things.
|
| One would be to come up with a simple taxation formula for
| individual income.
|
| (1) No deductions.
|
| (2) Peg the tax rate to a formula, something like tax = 1% per
| $10,000 of income. (These specific numbers would not work very
| well.)
|
| This would be simple, absolutely predictable, and would set a
| maximum income at whatever the culture decided was right.
|
| And/Or: eliminate inheritance.
|
| This could replace a maximum income because no one could pass
| along a fortune to heirs, and wealth would be automatically
| recycled on death.
|
| (1) Set up a citizen's commission that selects members at random
| for a three-year term, 1/3 of members to be replaced each year.
|
| (2) The commission decides what entities are worthwhile.
| (Charitable, non-profit, humanitarian, research, whatever.)
|
| (3) At death, any remaining funds belonging to a person are
| disbursed.
|
| (4) Disbursed funds go to eligible entities selected by the
| deceased, or to the U.S. Treasury as a default.
|
| (5) Wealthy individuals can support their children through
| college up to age 25 or so, after which the kids are on their
| own.
|
| (6) Not necessarily any limit on how much wealth a person could
| accumulate because it would be impossible to develop a hereditary
| plutocratic class.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| That sounds like a dystopian nightmare that is incompatible
| with private ownership of anything.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| Faroe Islands is a tiny speck. Countries are a cross between oil
| tankers and nuclear power plants.
|
| There's nothing to learn politicians have debated every single
| tax system known to human civilization. But even small changes
| are Herculean tasks.
| soneil wrote:
| I always find "but they're small" to be a lazy argument for
| things like this - I heard it recently in regards to Estonia's
| digital services also.
|
| "It's easy for them to do, but we're a huge country with near-
| infinite resources, we couldn't possibly". I mean sure, it
| means you have to scale the operation to match, which is why
| the IRS has more staff than the Faroes have population. But "we
| can't take on these projects, we're too big" makes it sound
| like we should have expected Belgium to land on the moon
| instead of the US.
| pigsty wrote:
| I think there's a difference though when a country has a
| population less than a typical large corporation and no major
| industry whatsoever. It's at a scale where everyone knows
| somebody who can help you get things done.
| soneil wrote:
| What I'm not convinced of is that complexity is actually a
| necessity.
|
| For example, what's the real difference between operating a
| fire department in a town on the Faroes, vs a town in the
| Mid-west? It seems like a fairly cookie-cutter operation
| where requiring more of them in total does not add
| complexity to each operation.
|
| Possibly even the opposite, where the scale of the US turns
| into a net benefit, so you can support your own industries
| building and providing tenders/appliances - where the
| Faroes are (I assume) more likely to ship one from Germany.
|
| So I'm not clear why taxation within a single state has to
| be more complex than taxation within a small nation. I'm
| not going to deny that it probably is, and probably will
| be, but I'm less comfortable with the assumption that it
| must be.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| Landing a man on the moon is not a problem that increases in
| complexity with population size, taxation is. "Things like
| this" are exactly where "but they're small" is a perfectly
| legitimate response. To say "oh just scale the operation"
| ignores the fact that scaling is just about one of the
| hardest problems we face in human organisations.
| kybernetyk wrote:
| [flagged]
| expazl wrote:
| > THE FAROES ARE ONE OF THE RICHEST COUNTRIES in the world by per
| capita GDP--even slightly richer than Denmark itself.
|
| The Faroe Islands are a strange place. There aren't many people,
| yet you'll see huge infrastructure projects to literally drill
| tunnels through mountains to connect at 2-3 families with the
| main roads. A gigantic amount of public money gets pumped into
| every part of their industry and infrastructure, funded by
| Denmark.
|
| On a completely unrelated note, the the wife of the previous
| prime minister is from the Faroe Islands, and he has been known
| for being bad at separating private and public interests, and for
| cases of pumping money into specific monopolistic fishermens
| pockets while taking huge donations from the same to his own
| funds. The two of them also own a company that plans tours from
| Denmark to the Faroe Islands.
|
| He's no longer prime minister but managed to create a central
| party that was key in establishing the current government. I'm
| sure we'll see a continuation of pumping money into the Faroe
| Islands.
|
| All that said, it's a lovely place to visit, especially for
| people who enjoy hiking and don't mind damp weather, and there's
| some cool places to see puffins.
| tokai wrote:
| I think I read that they are planning to start lowering the
| financial support from Denmark this year. But only by a small
| bit. With no concrete plan of weaning fully of it. So the end
| of the union still is far off it seems. As long as Greenland
| wants support they should get it, as they really need it, but
| the Faroe Islands should have been on-track for independence a
| long time ago imo.
| notahacker wrote:
| I think the Faroes being a country with high levels of evenly-
| distributed wealth and a profitable but not-very-diverse
| business sector is why they get the luxury of having a simple
| tax system with limited pressure to add deductions (that and
| taxes not actually needing to be high enough to cover
| government spending). Certainly the wealth is more a cause of
| the tax simplicity than the other way round.
|
| Back of the math envelope suggests the overheads of running
| their system aren't _that_ low either (the 70m krone budget
| serves a population of just 54000 people). The IRS budget is
| closer to $14bn a year, but it serves around 330m people, and
| nobody accuses the US of being a model of efficiency.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Taxing businesses on gross revenues (what "no deductions" means)
| is a huge bias in favor of vertical integration and large
| conglomerates.
|
| If I'm a small company and participate in a chain of 8 companies
| providing a good or service, there is a large multiple of tax
| paid on that good as compared to a competitor who manages to do
| all 8 things in a single company. (This is why VAT taxation works
| better and is more common than a gross receipts tax.)
| chadash wrote:
| i guess that in a very strict sense "no deductions" might mean
| you can't deduct business expenses, but I doubt that the tax
| code ACTUALLY works that way. I think the article is talking
| about individual, not business deductions.
|
| If you taxed revenues, some businesses would just be impossible
| to run. I have to imagine that there are grocery stores and
| pharmacies in the Faroe Islands.
| lokar wrote:
| I think the article was talking about tax incentives and
| social spending when they say deductions
| analog31 wrote:
| I wonder if the article perpetuates the confusion about
| "deductions." I run a small business and use Schedule C on my
| tax return. Basically, Schedule C has you write down your
| revenues, and subtract your costs. The difference is what ends
| up in the income section of your main form. "Deductions" come
| later in the form.
| [deleted]
| Symbiote wrote:
| Here's the English part of the Faroese government's website on
| tax: https://www.taks.fo/en/individuals/tax/
|
| And for businesses: https://www.taks.fo/en/business/starting-a-
| business/starting...
|
| I think "no deductions" means there aren't hundreds of
| complicated rules like the USA has. The page says "Operational
| costs should be deducted from the taxable income. Operational
| costs are the expenses that are necessary for the business to
| operate, such as rent, electricity, maintenance, furniture,
| equipment, transportation, insurance, bookkeeping, telephone
| expenses etc."
|
| VAT is 25%.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| VAT is called indirect TAx. Income tax is called direct tax.
|
| The author means to say income tax deductions for employees on
| their earned wages during the year.
|
| They did not explain if they charge any sales tax (vat) on
| export of fish or locally or any import duty on imported goods
| so this is very specific about its explanation
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| As someone who does Indian direct and indirect taxes as my day
| job, I can comfortably say it is "fucked up".
|
| The problem starts small. They introduced a new indirect tax act
| in 2017 (gst) and it was fine for a couple of weeks but suddenly
| every business user was supposed to get registered at a
| centralized portal. Cool but there was penalty for delay and
| penalty for filing returns late. Cool. So they got an amendment.
| Fine. Next day a notification. Next day a circular.
|
| In the last 5-6 years, they have changed the act in like
| 1200-1300 times by way of various amendments, rules,
| notifications, orders, not to talk about court judgments.
|
| You are NEVER sure if you know something to be a fact when in
| fact 2 years ago a particular notification amended the act to be
| read in a certain way. Then another amended it further. Then
| again.
|
| All the while the govt accepts the fact that all taxpayers are
| not paying govt their dues so they treat them as such, Financial
| criminals so there is jail provisions even.
|
| Direct tax is no different. You annual " income tax return" is to
| be prepared in 1 our of 7 forms. Cool. Then you have to see
| various schedules and time limits and audits and compliances and
| other stuff. A lot of stuff DOES MAKE SENSE but you have to have
| practiced for 5-12 years before saying that. Then it kinda makes
| sense on an overall level. For everyone else, go fuck yourself.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| It's completely irrational but any mention of this place is
| tainted by their dolphin hunts. How about learn about their taxes
| and they learn about PR.
| metacritic12 wrote:
| The article has a good point from a few Faroese guys about how
| the mass inhumane US harvesting of beef, chicken, and pigs, is
| probably very similar in aggregate.
|
| But when the food item is something Americans culturally eat,
| it becomes difficult for animal rights activists to push on
| because they get labeled as crazy immediately. Whereas food
| items Americans are not used to eating like whale or snake gets
| a round of applause from Americans and justifies a bit of
| underlying racism about how that other culture is simply an
| inhuman culture.
| tokai wrote:
| Its a bad comparison. Breeding or harvesting an animal is not
| the same. They provide different suffering for the animals
| and different pressures on different biotopes. Its very much
| like the old soviet whataboutism when pressured on their
| domestic suppression: "well in the US they lynch people".
| Meat production in US might be bad, but its not a defense for
| overfishing the Atlantic.
| theonlybutlet wrote:
| It's the intelligence of the animal that's the issue. Not
| some cultural bias.
| metacritic12 wrote:
| Pigs are widely considered pretty intelligent, but I don't
| think the median American thinks of then as more wrong to
| eat than say chicken.
| Symbiote wrote:
| > Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or
| post to complain about in the thread. Find something
| interesting to respond to instead.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| bigpeopleareold wrote:
| I was just thinking while reading this that with a country with a
| small population like the Faroe Islands, it is a bit harder to do
| regulatory capture. The impact is far greater and the established
| legacy is one towards simplicity than complexity. Changes are
| just felt more.
|
| In my case, I think my taxes in Norway are easier to deal with as
| compared to filing US taxes just because there isn't much
| incentive to take advantage of the bureaucracy and procedures
| around it like in the US. It's a little complex in Norway, but I
| can and have guessed correctly what my tax burden would be
| outside what was directly reported to Skattetaten. I imagine it
| is even easier for tiny countries (or semi-autonomous regions)
| like what the Faroese have.
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