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VAT and Amazon

I have been an Amazon customer for about ten years and I am sure that when I first started ordering books from the UK to where I live in Denmark they didn't charge VAT (sales tax) because books are zero-rated in the UK.

Then they did which eroded the reason for using them a lot and meant that I would only use Amazon if I couldn't get the books online from anyone else. What intrigued me was that other online book sellers in the UK were not charging me VAT. So I queried this with Amazon who told me that these were EU regulations.

So my next ploy was to ask family members to order them on my behalf and have them delivered to me in Denmark. I was amazed that Amazon charged them Danish VAT if they did this so I stopped asking them.

A few days ago I went back to Amazon to order a couple of books to be sent to various family members in the UK as Christmas gifts and I was not charged VAT. It makes me wonder if this so-called VAT which I have been paying in recent years ever made it into the Danish tax coffers.

A boring topic maybe but it hits my pocket and I have a vestigial interest in the EU having written a textbook about it some years back.

Keywords: Amazon, VAT

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Anne Fox

Working online

Last week was a busy week in Germany where Susanne Nyrop and I were finishing one project MediaNetWorks, kicking off a new one LIPS, and taking part in a M anaging Cultural Diversity seminar. Our main mission was to talk about working online in general and the Nordic Voice conference in particular.

As a result we were invited to support the online working of the new project so this was a very satisfying result.

Keywords: LIPS, Managing Cultural Diversity, MediaNetWorks, Nordic Voice

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Anne Fox

Sim School

What a wonderful and inevitable idea! Sim School for pre-service teachers, people who are likely to have spent hours on the Sims in their youth and will understand the context.

Of course it's not a substitute for the real thing but as a way of starting to make you think about the consequences of your actions in the classroom, great idea.

The only thing is that the website did not seem to be working very well for me and I am not sure whether a prototype is available yet.

Keywords: sims, simschool

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Anne Fox

Letter to Santa

What I would really like to see is a WISWYG editor in Elgg. I feel it is a big barrier that there is not an easier way of adding links.

Here is what happens to me:

I want to add a link and vaguely remember the html code needed for it (Elgg is the only place where I need to remember the code) so I take a guess and hit post and of course it is wrong. So I then go to an old post to see how it is done and then spend a lot of time faffing about between edit mode in the new post and edit mode in the old post before I finally get it right.

I have the patience to do this but many others either wouldn't have the patience or wouldn't even realise it is possible to add links, including any students I may have in the future.

Please Santa?

Keywords: WISIWYG

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