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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, @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]