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It's a delicious structure consisting of a small sponge with a chocolate cap covering a veneer of orange jelly. It is arguably Britain's greatest invention after the steam engine and the light bulb. But is a Jaffa Cake actually a biscuit, asks David Edmonds.
This question reheats a confectionery conundrum first raised in 1991. A tax is charged on chocolate-covered biscuits, but not on cakes. The manufacturer, McVities, had always categorised them as cakes and to boost their revenue the tax authorities wanted them recategorised as biscuits.
A legal case was fought in front of a brilliant adjudicator, Mr D C Potter. For McVities, this produced a sweet result. The Jaffa Cake has both cake-like qualities and biscuit-like qualities, but Mr Potter's verdict was that, on balance, a Jaffa Cake is a cake.
[...] We are tempted to think that every concept must have a strict definition to be useable. But Wittgenstein pointed out that there are many "family-resemblance" concepts, as he called them. Family members can look alike without sharing a single characteristic. Some might have distinctive cheek bones, others a prominent nose, etc. Equally, some concepts can operate with overlapping similarities. Take the concept of "game". Some games involve a ball, some don't. Some involve teams, some don't. Some are competitive, some are not. There is no characteristic that all games have in common.
And there is no strict definition of "cake" or "biscuit" that compels us to place the Jaffa Cake under either category.
Another temptation is to believe that all that is at stake here is an arbitrary issue of semantics. It is, the thought goes, a mere verbal convention whether one labels a Jaffa Cake a cake or a biscuit. It has nothing to do with the real world.
The distinction between statements that are true as a matter of convention or language ("All triangles have three sides"), and those that make a claim about the empirical world ("It is possible to eat 13 Jaffa Cakes in a minute") - is a longstanding one in philosophy. But in the middle of the last century the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine disputed whether such a rigid distinction could be maintained - and Tim Crane agrees with him that it cannot.
What say you, soylentils? Is it a cake or a biscuit? Is it both or neither?
Source:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38985820
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 22 2017, @03:51PM
On the bright side the government trying to be too smart for its own good is just as much of a PITA.
As a parallel example close to my heart (or wallet anyway) my state sales tax does not apply to custom software development, although it does apply to software maintenance contracts, so I quite literally pay a bug tax on code written under maintenance vs tax free code written as a project. At a healthy billable rate and sane minimum charges it costs like "a lunch" worth of money to make a bug change as a support request as opposed to as a project request.
Also if I write code for a client and maintain ownership and license them to use it that's tax free because custom software development is explicitly tax free, but if I license my code to a second client that's "prewritten computer software" and is explicitly sales taxable. Unless they're in another state, where it gets complicated.
Hilariously the state publishes a guide that states that "answering peoples questions" and "reformatting data" and "designing interfaces" is non-taxable but a maintenance contract which involves answering peoples questions is taxable. So SOME bug reports are not sales taxable if its just a question or a minor DB change or a minor UI change, but something like controller code in a MVC framework is taxable because its neither touching the DB nor the web page. Hilarious!
Also "assessment services" are non-taxable but actually patching as an activity to stay up to date is explicitly taxable. So "apt-get update" is tax free, "apt-get -fudy dist-upgrade" is tax free, "apt-get dist-upgrade" is totally sales taxable because its actively patching stuff. So contracts gotta specify separate project breakouts for looking for patches and considering patching vs actually patching. Customers sometimes like that anyway I guess WRT nighttime maint windows.
Sometimes you wonder why contractors do shit like "apt-get dist-upgrade" or local equivalent in crontab while also billing for maintenance services, well, they're actually just billing for assessment services and only paying sales tax by filing a bug if it goes wrong or looks like it'll go wrong, otherwise they're just making sure stuff is getting patched.
Honestly I'm not sure if writing ansible scripts to automate ongoing maintenance is taxable or not. Something like that I think you're best off paying the tax just to avoid an audit.
Anyway the point of all this BS is when the .gov thinks its too smart, when the rubber hits the road things get all Fed up just as bad anyway.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 22 2017, @04:43PM
What fucked-up state is this that taxes all these standard computer activities?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 22 2017, @05:01PM
Not to drop the docs but I checked some generic midwestern states and its vaguely normal for that location. Check your own state, you might be surprised.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:04PM
No wonder California is still #1 for tech business. Other states keep trying to tout their "low" cost of living, but with insane business taxes and regulations like these, no one wants to run a business there.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 22 2017, @06:14PM
Yeah I can bill a lot of sales tax when comparable housing is a tenth CA cost, and the climate and geography and crime level here is much better.
Its not really all that bad. You sell a thing or a service and you pay the sales tax. The complication is there's a loophole where custom software development and R+D analysis type work is tax free and the "helpful" government provided documents make stuff more confused rather than clear stuff up. Which is the connection to Jaffa Cakes where if you think its bad when .gov just says "cake" and "biscuit" without definition, I can assure you that kind of .gov bureaucrat can generate 10 pages of junk that is both extremely specific, yet not really any help at all WRT clearing things up or making sense of anything.
Amusingly I googled up California's custom software sales tax and the main difference between CA and the midwest is taxes are a little less than twice as high in CA, LOL. Pretty much same rules. Note that I study the hell out of my states sales tax laws because I don't want to end up in PMITA prison as per Office Space, and I invested like 15 seconds studying CA so I'm very unlikely to be wrong about my state and somewhat likely to be wrong about CA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @12:16AM
the climate [...] here is much better [than in California]
Clearly, your current residence is in Heaven.
What do you guys do for fun there besides ride around on clouds?
[and the geography here is is much better than in California]
In SoCal, it's a short ride to the beach (for folks who aren't already there).
It's a short ride to the mountains (for folks who aren't already there).
The whole place is actually desert but, with imported water, there's lots of green space.
To get to "the desert" (the non-"improved" area) is a short ride.
(All of this is a big reason that the movie industry settled here.)
You have geography better than that??
and crime level
I find that people who don't live in the low-rent district don't tend to encounter crime--regardless of the city/state/region.
housing is a tenth CA cost
Yeah, you got us there.
We tend to call the high cost of living "The Paradise Tax".
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]